Estimating the basic friction angle of a very strong meta-sandstone for rockfill strength prediction

摘要

Rock fills are used for multi-purposes in coastal engineering. They form the foundation base and the core of seawater breakers. They serve as run ways for cranes that lift-up large armourstones to erect seawater breakers. They are also dumped on beaches to function as dynamic sea water defence and mitigate coastal erosion. As testing rock fills at the field scale requires metric to decametric set-ups and is therefore challenging, engineers favour simple models that capture reasonably well the physics of the behaviour of rock fill and give a first estimation of the strength of a rock fill. Barton & Kjaernsli (1981) and Barton (2008) took advantage of the analogy between the behaviour of discontinuities and rock fills, and proposed an elegant model inspired from the Barton and Choubey model for joints (Barton & Choubey, 1977), that allows to predict the strength of rock fills for a wide range of stresses, included the very low stresses.