Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Monitoring brittle fracture processes is important in a wide variety of geotechnical environments and materials. Reliability in the design and performance of rock and soil excavations, both surface and underground, has significant implications for society in terms of safety and economics. A portable brittle fracture monitoring facility will use the characteristics of acoustic emissions to aid in our understanding of failure mechanisms in both field and laboratory environments. The monitoring/characterization of rock slope instability and associated brittle fracture/damage mechanisms will be undertaken at varying scales including highway cuts, quarries, surface mines and large open pits (up to a km in depth). The portable brittle fracture monitoring instrumentation system will be used underground to monitor pillar, roof and floor performance and the development of progressive damage in a range of mine environments. Fundamental studies on the brittle fracture monitoring of materials both in the laboratory and in the field will also be highly relevant to rock mechanics studies associated with natural hazards (landslides, subsidence, vulcanicity, earthquakes) and resource geotechncs. The portable brittle fracture monitoring equipment will be incorporated into existing LiDAR, ground based InSAR, photogrammetry, survey and geophysical instrumentation in order to form an integrated multi-component brittle fracture/rock mass characterization facility. The results of this system will be used to constrain numerical monitoring using state-of-the art numerical codes and visualized/interpreted using a large scale 3D graphics platform