Consideration of proneness of rocks to strain-bursting through an assessment of elastic parameters

In general, the violent fracturing and ejection of rock from an excavation face is referred to as ‘bursting’. Bursting is one of the most serious and least understood problems facing deep un-derground excavations and is extremely hazardous to both workers and infrastructure. The defi-nition of a rockburst varies greatly between countries, companies, operations and engineers. This variation stems from the fact that we can recognize different causes, styles and conse-quences of bursting behavior. At any particular location, bursting is generally assessed based on a history of ground performance observations. However these observations note a significant contrast in the behavior of equally-competent and strong rock masses in similar environments. To understand this contrast in behavior, static and dynamic elastic deformation properties of suites of standard intact rock tests, along with their observed failure modes have been used to identify rocks prone to bursting.