A field explosion test is conducted to investigate the shock wave propagation in jointed rock masses. The coupled method of UDEC and AUTODYN-2D is applied to predict the rock mass response due to the explosion. Comparing the prediction result with the field explosion test result and empirical formulas, it is evident that the numerical method is capable of modelling explosion problems with high reliability. The prediction result is calibrated by involving the test condition modifications and the dynamic equation of state of the rock. It is shown that the calibration result is in a better agreement with the test result than prediction result, indicating that inputting dynamic parameters is very important to obtain reliable results.
The software package UDEC has been widely used to model static problems in jointed rock masses (Cundall 1980; Hart and St. John 1986; Fairhurst and Pei 1990; Barton et al. 1994; Shen and Barton 1997). However, only few studies on UDEC modelling of explosion problems have been presented because the explosion load is very difficult to be determined (Lemos 1987; Brady 1990; Rosengren 1993; Senseny and Simons 1994). Chen and Zhao (1998) proposed a coupled method of UDEC and AUTODYN-2D to model the explosion problems, in which the explosion load is provided by the AUTODYN-2D modelling and then applied to the UDEC modelling to simulate the wave propagation in jointed rock masses. In this study, a field explosion test is conducted to investigate the shock wave propagation in jointed rock masses. Comparing the modelling results with the test result and empirical formulas indicates that the numerical method is capable of modelling explosion problems with high reliability, especially at near field, and that the calibration result agrees better with the test result than the prediction result.
