ABSTRACT
Microseismic events are indicators of the fracturing or damage process as the rock mass fails. By capturing the microseismic events, underground excavation induced rock mass degradation or damage can thus be measured. A damage-driven numerical model is presented that takes the microseismic data as inputs to determine the fracture density. The rock mass is then softened according to a micro-mechanics based constitutive model. The material property inputs for the model are Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratio of the intact rock, and the information related to the microseismic events such as the location and the source size of each event. Using the data from the Underground Research Laboratory (URL) as an example, we have investigated the linkage between microseismicity, rock mass damage and ground deformation. It is seen that when softening based on microseismic data is considered, better correspondence between observed and calculated results can be achieved.
