The Numerical Simulation of Hard Rocks for Tunnelling Purposes at Great Depths: A Comparison between the Hybrid FDEM Method and Continuous Techniques

Figure 10

Damage profiles obtained from each intact numerical model (DFN geometries are not integrated in the models): purple continuous line—FEM Hoek–Brown model, red dashed line—FEM-DISL model, blue dotted line—collapsed material of the FDEM model (HDZ), blue dash-dotted line—damaged (fractured) material of the FDEM model (EDZ). In Figure 8, it can be observed that the collapsed material is detaching from the rockmass. On the contrary, the damaged material fractures but maintains its integrity and does not collapse. The results are compared to the actual damaged profile as observed at the URL Test Tunnel [48], and acoustic emission (AE) and microseismic (MS) events are also plotted for comparison [49].