An experimental study of scale effect on the shear behavior of rock joints

Mechanical behavior of rock joints usually can be characterized by small-scale laboratory shear tests due to economical and technical limitations, but their applicability to the behaviour of rock mass has been always questioned by a number of researchers because of scale effect. Though there have been several researches regarding the scale effect, it has been a controversial problem how to apply the result of small-scale laboratory shear test directly to field design from different conclusions among researchers. In order to grasp the trend of scale effect of shear behavior, a series of direct shear tests on replicas of natural rock joint surfaces made of gypsum cement with different size and roughness were conducted and analyzed. Result showed that as the size of the specimen increased, average peak shear displacement increased, but average shear stiffness and average peak dilation angle decreased. As for the dependency of scale on shear strength, the degree of scale effect was dependent on normal stress and roughness of rock joint. For the condition of low normal stress and high roughness, decrease of average peak shear strength with increasing size of joint was evident.