TABLE OF CONTENTS The subject of rock mechanics started in the 1950s from a rock physics base and gradually became a discipline in its own right during the 1960s. As explained in the Preface, rock mechanics is the subject concerned with the response of rock to an applied disturbance, which is considered here as an engineering, i.e. a man-induced, disturbance. For a natural disturbance, rock mechanics would apply to the deformation of rocks in a structural geology context, i.e. how the folds, faults, and fractures developed as stresses were applied to the rocks during orogenic and other geological processes. However, in this book we will be concerned with rock mechanics applied to engineering for civil, mining, and petroleum purposes.
Thus, rock mechanics may be applied to many engineering applications ranging from dam abutments, to nuclear power station foundations, to the manifold methods of mining ore and aggregate materials, to the stability of petroleum wellbores and including newer applications such as geothermal energy and radioactive waste disposal. Probably, the main factor that distinguishes rock mechanics from other engineering disciplines is the application of mechanics on a large scale to a pre-stressed, naturally occurring material.
In the two photographs in Figs 1.1 and 1.2, we illustrate a typical full-scale rock structure and a closer view of the rock material itself. It is quite clear from these illustrations that the nature of the rock mass and the rock material must be taken into account in both the basic mechanics and...
