• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.28-53
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• 2024

In general, high-level radioactive waste (HLW) generated as a result of nuclear power generation should be disposed within the country. Determination of the disposal site and host rock for HLW deep geological repository is an important issue not only scientifically but also politically, economically, and socially. Considered host rock types worldwide for geological disposal include crystalline rocks, sedimentary rocks, volcanic rocks, and salt dome. However, South Korea consists of various rock types except salt dome. This paper not only analyzed the geological and rock mechanical characteristics on a nationwide scale with the preliminary results on various rock type studies for the disposal host rock, but also reviewed the characteristics and possibility of various rock types as a host rock through deep drilling surveys. Based on the nationwide screening for host rock types resulted from literature review, rock distributions, and detailed case studies, Jurassic granites and Cretaceous sedimentary rocks (Jinju and Jindong formations) were derived as a possible candidate host rock types for the geological disposal. However, since the analyzed data for candidate rock types from this study is not enough, it is suggested that the disposal rock type should be carefully determined from additional and detailed analysis on disposal depth, regional characteristics, multidisciplinary investigations, etc.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.269-281
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• 1994

Microscopic study and X-ray diffraction analysis were carried out to find out rock type, tock forming minerals; and weathering characteristics of rocks at the constructing site of the churyong Tunnel, Kyongju-Gun, Kyongbuk. Seismic velocity and compressional strength were measured to evaluate mechanical properties of rock. The rock of the study area is Jurassic tuff consisting of clay minerals, crystals of quartz and feldspar, fragments of volcanic rocks and shale. Fresh tuff has compressional strength of about $443kg/\textrm{cm}^2$ and seismic velocity of about 3680m/sec in average. It is classified as soft rock. Rock fragment within tuff is andesite and it has compressional strength of about $2500kg/\textrm{cm}^2$ and seismic velocity of about 4340m/sec in average. It is classified as hard rock. A good linear relationship is found between compressional streangth and seismic velocity in both laboratory sample and in-situ rocks. Laboratory samples has seismic velocities faster about 1.5km/sec than those in-situ rocks. It is interpreted that joints, fractures, and water content in the in-situ rocks result in decreas of seismic velocity. As Tuff has more than 50% of clay minerals in matrix and shale fragments, it absorbs water easily in atmospheric condition. Therefore, though the rock in the study area is medium hard rock before weathering, it is weathered very easily in the case of exposure to natural environment, comparing with other rock.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.367-376
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• 2017

Recently, tunneling under the seabed is becoming increasingly common in many countries. In Korea, there are proposals to tunnel from the mainland to Jeju Island. Safe construction requires geologic structures such as faults to be characterized during the design and construction phase; however, unlike on land, such structures are difficult to survey seabed. This study aims to develop an algorithm that uses geostatistics to automatically derive large-scale geological structures on the seabed. The most important considerations in this method are the optimal size of the moving window, the optimal type of spatial statistics, and determination of the optimal percentile standard. Finally, the optimal analysis algorithm was developed using the R program, which comprehensibly presents variations in spatial statistics. The program allows the type and percentile standard of spatial statistics to be specified by the user, thus enabling an analysis of the geological structure according to variations in spatial statistics. The geotechnical defense-training algorithm shows that a large, linear geological lineament is best visualized using a $3{\times}3$ moving window and a 10% upper standard based on the moving variance value and fractile. In particular, setting the fractile criterion to the upper 0.5% almost entirely eliminates the error values from the contour image.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.39 no.4 s.179
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• pp.441-450
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• 2006

The on-land seismic survey in Korea was begun in mid-1960s. Kim et al.(1967) of Korea Geological Survey reported on the result of gravity and seismic reflection surveys conducted in the Pohang area for the period of 1963-64 to assess its possibility of oil entrapment. Hyun and Kim (1966) carried out a refraction survey on the tunnel wall. Since then, the KGS geophysicists had conducted seismic surveys on Kyungsang sedimentary basin as a main project for several years. In 1970s, on-land seismic surveys had been conducted for various purposes such as site investigation for the nuclear power plants and industrial complex, exploration for ground water, mineral resources and underground tunnel. The first reflection survey with CMP acquisition was attempted in 1978 by using a digital recording system. But most of on-land seismic surveys had employed the refraction method until 1980s. In 1990s, high resolution reflection and various borehole seismic surveys such as tomography, uphole, downhole, cross-hole methods have been attempted by universities and engineering companies. The applications of on-land seismic surveys have been enlarged for both academic and industrial purposes such as investigation of geologic structure of the fault and tidal flat area, construction of highway, railroad and dam, geothermal energy and mineral resource exploration, environmental assessment for waste disposal sites and archaeological investigations. In 2002, the first crustal seismic survey was carried out on the profile of 294km length across the whole peninsular. It is expected that the advanced technology and experience acquired through offshore seismic surveys, which have been conducted in continental shelf of Korea and foreign oil fields, will stimulate the more active on-land seismic explorations.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.1-20
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• 1995

A train overturn accident occurred on March 1993 in the Gupo area, northern part of Pusan, unfortunately had taken a heavy toll of lives and caused a great loss of property as well. The reasons for the subsidence of the basement under the railroads, which presumed to be the main cause of the accident, have been investigated from many different angles, including conventional geotechnical investigation methods. The deduced nuin reasons of the subsidence were: 1. blasting for tunnel excavation (NATM) at about 39 meter under the railroads, and 2. unexpected change of bedrock conditions along the direction of tunnel. But this accident was derived nrranlv from the lack of geological and geotechnical information under railroad area because it was impossible to drill beneath the railroads. This paper introduces a new geophysical survey techniqueseisrnic geotomography, and shows some results of the method applying to investigate the underground structure of the accident area. This method not only overcomes the unfavourable environment which many conventional investigation methods cannot face, but produces an image of underground structure with high resolution. Furthermore, the outputs from geotomogaphic analysis could provide very valuable in-situ basic parameters (like seismic velocities, elastic moduli, etc.) which is essential to the design and construction.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.101-109
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• 2010

There are many slopes generally developed by excavation and cut slope with small steps on massive slopes of roads. Especially these cut slopes which excavating around fault fracture zone need a reinforcement technology in order to ensure safety. In the case of slope excavation, it is difficult to use the existing slope support at fracture zone because of geological characteristics. Especially the factor of safety decreases significantly due to the movement of blocks in bed rocks and the expansion of interspace of discontinuous planes in fractured zones caused by excavation. Thus an efficient reinforcement technique in accordance with geological properties of fracture zones needs to be developed because the existing slope support has a restricted application. Therefore it is necessary to develop the specialized rock bolt technique in order to ensure an efficient factor of safety for anomalous fracture zones in slopes and tunnels. The purpose of this study is to develop newly improved rock bolt to increase a supporting effect of the swellex bolt method used recently as a friction type in fracture zones.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.13-24
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• 2021

Tunnel boring machine (TBM) is widely used for tunnel excavation in hard rock and soft ground. In the perspective of TBM-based tunneling, one of the main challenges is to drive the machine optimally according to varying geological conditions, which could significantly lead to saving highly expensive costs by reducing the total operation time. Generally, drilling investigations are conducted to survey the geological ground before the TBM tunneling. However, it is difficult to provide the precise ground information over the whole tunnel path to operators because it acquires insufficient samples around the path sparsely and irregularly. To overcome this issue, in this study, we proposed a geological type classification system using the TBM operating data recorded in a 5 s sampling rate. We first categorized the various geological conditions (here, we limit to granite) as three geological types (i.e., rock, soil, and mixed type). Then, we applied the preprocessing methods including outlier rejection, normalization, and extracting input features, etc. We adopted a deep neural network (DNN), which has 6 hidden layers, to classify the geological types based on TBM operating data. We evaluated the classification system using the 10-fold cross-validation. Average classification accuracy presents the 75.4% (here, the total number of data were 388,639 samples). Our experimental results still need to improve accuracy but show that geology information classification technique based on TBM operating data could be utilized in the real environment to complement the sparse ground information.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.345-350
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• 2009

The endpoint of the Yangbuk tunnel constructed at the national road between Gyeongju and Gampo is composed of massive cutting because the road is driven through the sides of mountain. PAP(Prestressed Anchor and PC Pannel) retaining wall as a slope stability method was established over this section. Part of the anchor in PAP wall became broken after six months. We performed inverse analysis through its measurements obtained until that time. An geological investigation to confirm the condition of ground layering and the attraction force test to find as to whether some errors might be present in the anchor were made. According to the back analysis, it was turned out that the value with soil parameter 90% that was applied to the original design was pertinent. In the redesign, the permissible stress in the anchor body was changed from 306 kN to 591 kN and 784 kN and the fixation position was increased from 11.0 m to 23.0 m. Nevertheless, five months have passed since the exchange of the anchor, the measurement results validate that stable state has been maintained. This research is considered a case that the immediate maintenance helps prevent the slope accidents.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.309-323
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• 2005

Dynamic stiffness of subsurface materials is one of the most important geotechnical parameters in predicting deformational behavior of structures as well as practicing seismic design and performance evaluation. In an effort to measure the parameter efficiently and accurately, various borehole seismic testing techniques have been, thus, developed and used during past several decades. Moreover, recent rush of underground-space projects and increasing size of structures put more stress on reliable site investigation techniques in estimating stiffness of rock mass. In this paper, a new technique called 'in-hole seismic test' has been implemented to measure the dynamic stiffness of rock masses at subsurface foundations and tunnel-faces. The reliance of in-hole seismic test was evaluated by comparing the testing results at several rock sites with those of other borehole techniques and the technique tunnls out to be an efficient and accurate in-situ testing technique.

• The Journal of Engineering Geology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 1996

The fracture transmissivity($T_f$) is the most important parameter of fracture in assessing groundwater flow in fractured rock masses by using the DFN(Discrete Fracture Network) modeling. $T_f$, the most sensitive parameter m DFN modeling, is dependent upon aperture, size and filling characteristics of each fracture set. In the field test, the accuracy of $T_f$ can be increased with Borehole Acoustic Scanning (Televiewer) and Fixed Interval Length(FIL) test in constant head. $T_f$ values measured from FIL test was modified and estimated by each fracture set on the basis of the Cubic Law and the information of aperture and filling characteristics obtained from Televiewer. The modified $T_f$ results in the increase of confidence and reliability of modeling results including the amount of tunnel inflow.And, this approach would reduce the uncertaintity of the assessment for groundwater flow in fractured rock masses using the DFN modeling.