Sharif Digital Repository

Infill materials in rock joints usually cause a reduction in the joint shear strength. The shear behavior of rock discontinuities depends upon whether they are clean and unfilled or filled, so this concern invites accurate understanding of the shear behavior and strength of infilled joints. A series of constant normal load direct shear tests was performed to investigate the shear strength of artificial samples with infilled rough joint surfaces having different asperity and infill characteristics. The current study focuses on the effects of factors that influence the shear strength of infilled rock joints samples, with emphasis on forward and reverse shearing. In the forward cycle, the front... 

The pre-cracked Brazilian disc specimens of rock-like materials (Portland Pozzolana cement (PPC), fine sands, and water) are especially prepared in a rock mechanics laboratory to study the breaking process of brittle solids. The Brazilian discs may contain one, two, three, four, and five (parallel) center slant cracks (45° to the horizontal) under compressive line loading. The breaking load of the pre-cracked disc specimens is measured showing that as the number of cracks increases, the final breakage load of the specimen decreases. The experiments are carried out under compression (just like the Brazilian tests used for measuring the indirect tensile strength of intact rocks). It has been... 

Permeability variations in reservoirs and around boreholes are of great interest in petroleum engineering due to the fact that they can significantly affect reserve estimates, reservoir development, well production or injection rate, and the likely success of remedial actions of near-wellbore damage. A fully coupled transient thermo-poroelastic concept with and without rock mechanical damage models is employed to evaluate stress distribution and permeability variation around the boreholes and breakouts. The anisotropy concept is applied to permeability, rock modulus, and uniaxial compressive strength using Weibull distribution. The Mogi–Coulomb failure criterion is employed to model breakout... 

In tunneling projects and open-pit mines, drilling and blasting is a common method for fragmenting the rock masses. Although fragmentation is the main aim of blasting, the adverse effects such as air-overpressure (AOp) and ground vibration are unavoidable. Among these unwanted effects, AOp is considered as one of the most important effects which can cause damage to nearby structures. Therefore, precise estimation of AOp is required for minimizing the environmental problems. This article proposes three new models for predicting blast-induced AOp at Shur river dam area, Iran, optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO). For this aim, 80 blasting events were investigated and the requirement... 

An axial load-transfer analysis for energy piles is presented in this study that incorporates empirical models for estimating the side shear resistance and end bearing capacity in rock along with associated normalized stress-displacement curves. The analysis was calibrated using results from field experiments involving monotonic heating of three 15.2 m-long energy piles in sandstone. Analyses of the field experiments indicates that poor cleanout of the excavations led to an end restraint smaller than that expected for a clean excavation in sandstone. Specifically, end bearing parameters representative of cohesionless sand were necessary to match the load-transfer analysis to the field... 

Numerous cases of casing failure have been reported worldwide. Depletion-induced compaction is one of the main factors that may cause casing failure. Stress perturbation in salt layers may accommodate rock flow which endangers the stability of cased wells. Besides, poor cementing jobs are recognized as one of the wellbore instability causes. These factors need to be considered to determine the mechanism behind the casing failure. In this study, the creep behavior of the caprock salt layer in the southwest Iranian oil fields is experimentally studied through a number of creep tests under conditions of elevated temperature and pressure. Then, a three-dimensional finite element analysis is... 

In recent years, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are frequently used in many different applications of photogrammetry such as building damage monitoring, archaeological mapping and vegetation monitoring. In this paper, a new vertical take-off and landing fixed-wing UAS is proposed to robust photogrammetry missions, called SAMA-VTOL. In this study, the capability of SAMA-VTOL is investigated for generating orthophoto. The major stages are including designing, building and experimental scenario. First, a brief description of design and build is introduced. Next, an experiment was done to generate accurate orthophoto with minimum ground control points requirements. The processing step, which... 

Production of sand is a common issue in oil and gas fields causing various production problems. However, as a result of sand production, rock permeability can also be increased at near-wellbore areas, which is considered to be an advantage of solid particles production. Therefore, this study aims to investigate sand production behavior and permeability changes during sand production experimentally. To do so, a specific core flooding system capable of applying different radial and axial stresses has been designed which is equipped with a special fluid distributer at the outlet to prevent any sand particle blockage during fluid production. As part of this study, eleven unconsolidated synthetic... 

The casing-collapse hazard is one that drilling engineers seek to mitigate with careful well design and operating procedures. However, certain rock formations and their fluid pressure and stress conditions are more prone to casing-collapse risks than others. The Gachsaran Formation in south west Iran, is one such formation, central to oil and gas resource exploration and development in the Zagros region and consisting of complex alternations of anhydrite, marl and salt. The casing-collapse incidents in this formation have resulted over decades in substantial lost production and remedial costs to mitigate the issues surrounding wells with failed casing string. High and vertically-varying... 

In offshore Iran, wellbore instability is quite common and the main cause for most of problems during drilling operations. In this study, the existing relevant logs, drilling and other data from offset well were analyzed and integrated to construct a precise Mechanical Earth Model (MEM) describing pore pressure, stress magnitudes and orientation, and formation mechanical properties of the South Pars Gas field. Then, the constructed MEM was refined and calibrated using the existing caliper, image logs, rock mechanical core test and drilling data and through history matching to constrain and reduce the uncertainties associated with limitations and availability of the existing data. Using the... 

The main purpose of this study is to compare the many different rock properties in the rock sawability. The comparison was realized with the combination of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Fuzzy Delphi method and also TOPSIS method. The analysis is one of the multi-criteria techniques providing useful support in selecting among several alternatives with different objectives and criteria. FDAHP method was used in determining the weights of the criteria by decision makers and then ranking the sawability of the rocks was determined by TOPSIS method. The study was supported by the results obtained from a questionnaire carried out to know the opinions of the experts in this subject.... 

The prediction of production rate in ornamental stones sawing is very important in cost estimation and process planning of the rock sawing plants. The main aim of this paper is finding a mathematical correlation between production rate and rock brittleness indexes. The utilized data have been collected from several stone factories in Iran. Seventeen different granite and carbonate rocks have been experienced sawing conditions with large-diameter circular saws. The laboratory tests such as uniaxial compressive strength and tensile strength, were carried out on the rock samples which were collected from these factories. The ratio of compressive strength to tensile strength (B1), the ratio of... 

In this paper, a fully coupled numerical model is presented for the finite element analysis of the deforming porous medium interacting with the flow of two immiscible compressible wetting and non-wetting pore fluids. The governing equations involving coupled fluid flow and deformation processes in unsaturated soils are derived within the framework of the generalized Biot theory. The displacements of the solid phase, the pressure of the wetting phase and the capillary pressure are taken as the primary unknowns of the present formulation. The other variables are incorporated into the model using the experimentally determined functions that define the relationship between the hydraulic... 

In this study, the nonlinear seismic analysis of a typical three-dimensional concrete faced rockfill dam is reported. Three components of the Loma Prieta (Gilroy 1 station) earthquake acceleration time history are used as input excitation. The dam under study is considered as if it were located in a prismatic canyon with a trapezoidal cross-section. A nonlinear model for the rockfill material is used, and contact elements with Coulomb friction law are utilized at the slab-rockfill interface. Vertical joints in the face slab are also considered in the finite element model. A substructure method, in which the unbounded soil is modelled by the scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM), is... 

In poorly developed fractured rocks, the contribution of individual fracture on rock conductivity should be considered. However, due to the lack of data, a deterministic approach cannot be used. The conventional way to model discrete fractures is to use a Poisson process, with prescribed distribution, for fracture size and orientation. Recently, a stochastic approach, based on the idea that the elastic energy due to fractures follows a Boltzmann distribution, has been used to generate realizations of correlated fractures in two dimensions. The elastic energy function has been derived by applying the appropriate physical laws in an elastic medium. The resulting energy function has been used... 

This paper presents a new point-to-face contact algorithm for contacts between two polyhedrons with planar boundaries. A new discrete numerical method called three-dimensional discontinuous deformation analysis (3-D DDA) is used and formulations of normal contact submatrices based on the proposed algorithm are derived. The presented algorithm is a simple and efficient method and it can be easily coded into a computer program. This approach does not need to use an iterative algorithm in each time step to obtain the contact plane, unlike the ‘Common-Plane’ method applied in the existing 3-D DDA. In the present 3-D DDA method, block contact constraints are enforced using the penalty method.... 

In tunneling projects and open-pit mines, drilling and blasting is a common method for fragmenting the rock masses. Although fragmentation is the main aim of blasting, the adverse effects such as air-overpressure (AOp) and ground vibration are unavoidable. Among these unwanted effects, AOp is considered as one of the most important effects which can cause damage to nearby structures. Therefore, precise estimation of AOp is required for minimizing the environmental problems. This article proposes three new models for predicting blast-induced AOp at Shur river dam area, Iran, optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO). For this aim, 80 blasting events were investigated and the requirement...