Concepts Used to Analyze and Determine Rock Slope Stability for Mining & Civil Engineering Applications

Slope stability plays an important role in rock engineering. During the design, construction and post design phases of rock slope stability, engineers and geologists need to pay close attention to the rock conditions within the rock slope to prevent slope failures, protect employees and maintain economic profit. This dissertation is based on a general four step procedure to construct and maintain rock slope stability with confidence. These four steps include field investigations, material testing and rock strength database, slope modelling and slope monitoring. The author provides past, present and alternatives methods for each step for the introduced slope stability procedure. Specific topics within each step are investigated displaying results, recommendations and conclusions. Step one involves data collection during field investigations for rock slope design. Orientation of rock core during drilling programs has become extremely pertinent and important for slope stability and underground mining operations. Orientation is needed to provide essential data to describe the structure and properties of discontinuities encountered during the design process to understand favourable and unfavourable conditions within a rock slope and underground openings. This chapter examines and discusses the limitations and benefits of four methods of obtaining borehole discontinuity orientations from drilling programs including clay-imprint, ACT I, II, III Reflex, EZY-MARK, and OBI/ABI Televiewer systems. Results, recommendations and conclusions are provided in this study. During step two to maintain rock slope stability, a rock strength database was created and used to correlate and compare RQD values to rock abrasion, shear strength and other rock characterization methods. Rock abrasion plays a significant role in geotechnical design, tunneling operations and the safety of foundations from scour; however, rock abrasion can be used to develop higher confidence in important parameters