Rapid profiling rock mass quality underneath tunnel face for Sichuan-Xizang Railway

Abstract

The Sichuan-Xizang Railway is a global challenge, surpassing other known railway projects in terms of geological and topographical complexity. This paper presents an approach for rapidly profiling rock mass quality underneath tunnel face for the ongoing construction of the Sichuan-Xizang Railway. It adopts the time-series method and carries out the quantitative analysis of the rock mass quality using the depth-series measurement-while-drilling (MWD) data associated with drilling of blastholes. A tunnel face with 15 blastholes is examined for illustration. The results include identification of the boundary of homogeneous geomaterial by plotting the blasthole depth against the net drilling time, as well as quantification of rock mass quality through the recalculation of the new specific energy. The new specific energy profile is compared and highly consistent with laboratory test, manual logging and tunnel seismic prediction results. This consistency can enhance the blasthole pattern design and facilitate the dynamic determination of charge placement and amount. This paper highlights the importance of digital monitoring during blasthole drilling for rapidly profiling rock mass quality underneath and ahead of tunnel face. It upgrades the MWD technique for rapid profiling rock mass quality in drilling and blasting tunnels.

Keywords

Measurement-while-drilling / Drilling and blasting / Rock mass quality / New specific energy / Constant penetration rate / Sichuan-Xizang railway / Tunnelling

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Siyuan Wu: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Min Qiu: Data curation, Investigation, Project administration, Resources. Zhao Yang: Funding acquisition, Project administration. Fuquan Ji: Investigation. Zhongqi Quentin Yue: Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

The paper is partially supported by grants from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong, China (Project Nos. HKU 17207518 and R5037-18). The authors thank CCCC Second Harbour Engineering Company Ltd. for the MWD data.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.undsp.2024.02.004.

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