... of the clean joints of soft rocks can be made using a simple spreadsheet with only parameters which represent the initial roughness of the joint and the boundary conditions (CNL or CNS), rather than several model parameters. Besides, it was observed that the results obtained from the proposed ANN model...

... Summary Weak rock is usually defined as the intact rock presenting strength bellow about 25 MPa. Lately, more and more engineering projects are being built on sites dominated by soft rocks, as hard rocks might be absent in the region or the best geological sites have been already utilized...

... Summary Commitment to study soft rocks requires the understanding of two distinct areas from what we know as Science: engineering and geology. In this context, this report aims to expose to the scientific community the necessity of turning evaluations about soft rocks back to the scene, well...