In rock drilling, the most important characteristic to clarify is the wear of the drill bits. The reason that the rock drill bits fail with time is wear. In dry sliding contact adhesive wear deteriorates the materials in contact, quickly, and is the result of shear fracture in the momentary contact joins between the surfaces. This paper aims at presenting an overview of the assessment of WC/Co cemented carbide (CC) tricone bit in rotary drilling. To study wear of these bits, two approaches have been used in this research. Firstly, the new bits were weighted before they mounted on the drill rigs and also after completion their useful life to obtain bit weight loss percentage. The characteristics of the rock types drilled by using such this bit were measured, simultaneously. Alternatively, to measure contact wear, namely, matrix wear a micrometer has been used with a resolution of 0.02 mm at different direction on the tricone bits. Equivalent quartz content (EQC), net quartz content (QC), muscovite content (Mu), coarseness index (CI) of drill cuttings and compressive strength of rocks (UCS) were obtained along with thin sections to investigate mineralogical properties in detail. The correlation between effective parameters and bit wear were obtained as result of this study. It was observed that UCS shows no significant correlation with bit wear. By increasing CI and cutting size of rocks wear of bit increases.

The applications of water jet cutting (WJC) in coal mine have progressed slowly. In this paper, we analyzed the possibility and reasonableness of WJC application to pressure relief in hard coal seam, simulated the distributive characteristics of stress and energy fields suffered by hard coal roadway wallrock and the internal relationships of the fields to the instability due to WJC (including horizontal radial slot and vertical annular slot) on roadway wallrock. The results showed that: (1) WJC can unload hard coal seam effectively by inducing stress release and energy dissipation in coal mass near its slots; its annular slots also can block or weaken stress and energy transfer in coal mass; (2) the two slots may cause "the beam structure" and "the small pillar skeleton", and "the layered energy reservoir structure", respectively, which lead to the increase in stress concentration and energy accumulation in coal element mass near the slots; (3) the reasonable design and optimization of slots' positions and their combination not only can significantly reduce the scope of stress concentration and energy accumulation, but also destroy coal mass structure on a larger scale to force stress to transfer deeper coal mass.

It is a common failure type that high-filled embankment slope sideslips. The deformation mechanism and factors influencing the sideslip of embankment slope is the key to reduce the probability of this kind of engineering disaster. Taking Liujiawan high-filled embankment slope as an example, the deformation and failure characteristics of embankment slope and sheet-pile wall are studied, and the factors influencing instability are analyzed, then the correlation of deformation rate of the anti-slide plies and each factor is calculated with multivariate linear regression analysis. The result shows that: (1) The length of anchoring segment is not long enough, and displacement direction of embankment and retaining structure are perpendicular to the trend of the highway; (2) The length of the cantilever segment is so large that the active earth pressures behind the piles are very large. Additionally, the surface drainage is not smooth, which leads to form a potential sliding zone between bottom of the backfill and the primary surface; (3) The thickness of the backfill and the length of the anti-slide pile cantilever segment have positive correlation with the deformation whereas the thickness of anti-slide pile through mudstone has a negative correlation with the deformation. On the other hand the surface water is a little disadvantage on the embankment stability.

Based on limit equilibrium principles, this study presents a theoretical derivation of a new analytical formulation for estimating magnitude and lateral earth pressure distribution on a retaining wall subjected to seismic loads. The proposed solution accounts for failure wedge inclination, unit weight and friction angle of backfill soil, wall roughness, and horizontal and vertical seismic ground accelerations. The current analysis predicts a nonlinear lateral earth pressure variation along the wall with and without seismic loads. A parametric study is conducted to examine the influence of various parameters on lateral earth pressure distribution. Findings reveal that lateral earth pressure increases with the increase of horizontal ground acceleration while it decreases with the increase of vertical ground acceleration. Compared to classical theory, the position of resultant lateral earth force is located at a higher distance from wall base which in turn has a direct impact on wall stability and economy. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the computations of lateral earth pressure distribution based on the suggested analytical method.

This research aims to analyze the fracture coalescence characteristics of brittle sandstone specimen ($80{\times}160{\times}30mm$ in size) containing various flaws (a single fissure, double squares and combined flaws). Using a rock mechanics servo-controlled testing system, the strength and deformation behaviours of sandstone specimen containing various flaws are experimentally investigated. The results show that the crack initiation stress, uniaxial compressive strength and peak axial strain of specimen containing a single fissure are all higher than those containing double squares, while which are higher than those containing combined flaws. For sandstone specimen containing combined flaws, the uniaxial compressive strength of sandstone increase as fissure angle (${\alpha}$) increases from $30^{\circ}$ to $90^{\circ}$, which indicates that the specimens with steeper fissure angles can support higher axial capacity for ${\alpha}$ greater than $30^{\circ}$. In the entire deformation process of flawed sandstone specimen, crack evolution process is discussed detailed using photographic monitoring technique. For the specimen containing a single fissure, tensile wing cracks are first initiated at the upper and under tips of fissure, and anti-tensile cracks and far-field cracks are also observed in the deformation process; moreover anti-tensile cracks usually accompanies with tensile wing cracks. For the specimen containing double squares, tensile cracks are usually initiated from the top and bottom edge of two squares along the direction of axial stress, and in the process of final unstable failure, more vertical splitting failures are observed in the ligament region. When a single fissure and double squares are formed together into combined flaws, the crack coalescence between the fissure tips and double squares plays a significant role for ultimate failure of the specimen containing combined flaws.

A nonlinear creep function incorporated into the elastic visco-plastic model may describe the long-term soil deformation more accurately. However, by applying the conventional procedure, there are challenges to determine the model parameters due to limitation of suitable data points. This paper presents a numerical solution to obtain several parameters simultaneously for a nonlinear elastic visco-plastic (EVP) model using the available consolidation data. The finite difference scheme using the Crank-Nicolson procedure is applied to solve a set of coupled partial differential equations of the time dependent strain and pore water pressure dissipation. The model parameters are determined by applying the algorithm of trust-region reflective optimisation in conjunction with the finite difference solution. The proposed method utilises all available consolidation data during dissipation of the excess pore water pressure to determine the required model parameters. Moreover, the reference time in the elastic visco-plastic model can readily be adopted as a unit of time; denoting creep is included in the numerical predictions explicitly from the very first time steps. In this paper, the settlement predictions of thick soft clay layers are presented and discussed to evaluate and compare the accuracy and reliability of the proposed method against the graphical procedure to obtain the model parameters. In addition, comparison of the available experimental results to the numerical predictions confirms the accuracy of the numerical procedure.

An experimental investigation into the uplift capacity of horizontal square plate anchors in sand with and without geogrid reinforcement is reported. The parameters investigated are the effect of the depth of the single layer of geogrid, vertical spacing of geogrid layers, number of geogrid layers, length of geogrid layers, the effects of embedment depth, and relative density of sand. A series of three dimensional finite element analyses model was established and confirmed to be effective in capturing the behaviour of plate anchor-reinforced sand by comparing its predictions with experimental results. The results showed that the geogrid reinforcement had a considerable effect on the uplift capacity of horizontal square plate anchors in sand. The improvement in uplift capacity was found to be strongly dependent on the embedment depth and relative density of sand. A satisfactory agreement between the experimental and numerical results on general trend of behaviour and optimum geometry of reinforcement placement is observed. Based on the model test results and the finite element analyses, optimum values of the geogrid parameters for maximum reinforcing effect are discussed and suggested.

The use of helical anchors has been extensively beyond their traditional use in the electrical power industry in recent years. They are commonly used in more traditional civil engineering infrastructure applications so that the advantages of rapid installation and immediate loading capability. The majority of the research has been directed toward the tensile uplift behaviour of single anchors (only one plate) by far. However, anchors commonly have more than one plate. Moreover, no thorough numerical and experimental analyses have been performed to determine the ultimate pullout loads of multi-plate anchors. The understanding of behavior of these anchors is unsatisfactory and the existing design methods have shown to be largely inappropriate and inadequate for a framework adopted by engineers. So, a better understanding of helical anchor behavior will lead to increased confidence in design, a wider acceptance as a foundation alternative, and more economic and safer designs. The main aim of this research is to use numerical modeling techniques to better understand multi-plate helical anchor foundation behavior in soft clay soils. Experimental and numerical investigations into the uplift capacity of helical anchor in soft clay have been conducted in this study. A total of 6 laboratory tests were carried out using helical anchor plate with a diameter of 0.05 m. The results of physical and computational studies investigating the uplift response of helical anchors in soft clay show that maximum resistances depend on anchor embedment ratio and anchor spacing ratio S/D. Agreement between uplift capacities from laboratory tests and finite element modelling using PLAXIS is excellent for anchors up to embedment ratios of 6.