In- situ stress solution theory for borehole overcoring technique incorporating time-dependent effect of stress relief and its applications

Abstract

In- situ stress is a key parameter for underground mine design and rock stability analysis. The borehole overcoring technique is widely used for in-situ stress measurement, but the rheological recovery deformation of rocks after stress relief introduces errors. To improve accuracy, this study proposes an in-situ stress solution theory that incorporates time-dependent stress relief effects. Triaxial stepwise loading-unloading rheological tests on granite and siltstone established quantitative relationships between instantaneous elastic recovery and viscoelastic recovery under different stress levels, confirming their impact on measurement accuracy. By integrating a dual-class elastic deformation recovery model, an improved in-situ stress solution theory was derived. Additionally, accounting for the nonlinear characteristics of rock masses, a determination method for time-dependent nonlinear mechanical parameters was proposed. Based on the CSIRO hollow inclusion strain cell, time-dependent strain correction equations and long-term confining pressure calibration equations were formulated. Finally, the proposed theory was successfully applied at one iron mine (736 m depth) in Xinjiang, China, and one coal mine (510 m depth) in Ningxia, China. Compared to classical theory, the calculated mean stress values showed accuracy improvements of 6.0% and 9.4%, respectively, validating the applicability and reliability of the proposed theory.

Keywords

In-situ stress solution theory / Borehole overcoring technique / Time-dependent effect of stress relief / Viscoelastic recovery strain of rock / In-situ stress measurement

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Daohong Xia: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Software, Data curation, Conceptualization. Shengjun Miao: Writing - review & editing, Resources, Methodol-ogy, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Lianjun Chen: Writ-ing - review & editing, Visualization, Resources, Formal analysis. Yuan Li: Data curation, Conceptualization. Zejing Liu: Visualiza-tion, Validation, Software. Rongmin Zhang: Visualization. Pengjin Yang: Validation. Pengcheng Li: Validation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-cial interests or personal relationsh ips that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science and Technol-ogy Major Project of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (No. 2024ZD1700201), the National Natural Science Founda-tion of China (Nos. U2034206, 51974014 and 51574014), the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (No. 2024A1515011631), and the National Key Research and Develop-ment Project of China (No. 2022YFC3004601).

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