Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers many aspects of time/rate dependency of rocks and associated engineering issues. It describes the fundamentals of this phenomenon, its mechanical modeling and some specific applications to actual problems. The book explains a thermo-hydro-mechanical model based on the mixture theory to couple thermal, hydrological and mechanical fields. The near-field disposal of nuclear wastes in rock is associated with thermo-hydro-mechanical aspects of the phenomenon. The nuclear-waste disposal issue in rock engineering is a very challenging problem for scientists and engineers of rocks and it involves very sophisticated interaction of fundamental governing equations. The nuclear waste disposal projects in countries utilizing nuclear energy and/or nuclear weapons require the consideration of a very long time span of at least 10,000 years for the assessment of response and stability of underground disposal facilities in rock.