Online Courses Handbook 2003

303154 (v.1) WASM Geomechanics 332

Area:	WASM Mining Engineering Teaching Area
Contact Hours:	5.0
Credits:	25.0
Lecture:	1 x 4 Hours Weekly
Practical:	1 x 1 Hours Weekly
Nature of soils. Particle size analysis. Plasticity of fine-grained soils. Phase relationships. Soil compaction. Flow of water in soils. Introduction to flownets. Effective stress. Sheer strength. Stresses in soils due to external loads. Active and passive earth pressure. Design of gravity and cantilever retaining walls. Introduction to types of foundations. Introduction to settlement. Bearing capacity of soils. Rock as an engineering material. State of stress in a solid body. Stress and strain, the fullstress and strain tensors, stress and strain invariants, rotation of axes, 3D Mohr circles, Hooke's law. The origin of insitu stress and strain. Intact rock, discontinuities and rock mass structure, failure mechanism, failure criteria (Mohr, Coulomb, Hoek and Brown). Stress around underground openings. Laboratory - field density measurement, liquid and plastic limit, compaction permeameter. Rock testing - UCS, UTS (Brazil test), triaxial determination of cohesion and internal angle of friction. Circular hole in a plate.

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