With the global growth in population and subsequent growth in industrial activities, projects are shifted to an increasingly underground depth. In engineering fields, such as transportation, oil and gas extraction /storage, and mining activities, there has been a growing number of projects occurring in deep rock formations. Deep rocks are under high in situ stresses, and excavation, tunnelling, and drilling all result in unloading external disturbance during and after construction. Abnormal failures of surrounding rocks (cracking, rock burst, spalling, slabbing) are frequently being reported in deep rock engineering structures and could potentially be disastrous for the safety of underground equipment and working staff. The mechanisms of such rock instabilities are worthy of investigation.

There is increasing interest in investigating the characteristics and mechanisms of deep rock failure by means of experiments and numerical simulations. In addition, the energy storage, consumption, and distribution phenomena always exist in rock fracturing progression. Rock fracturing can be essentially regarded as a progressive failure process driven by energy. Thus, more and more researchers are paying attention to the energy evolution behaviours in rock destruction and deformation, and a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of rock failure. Hence, it is important to better characterize various types of rocks under simulated in situ stress conditions.

This Special Issue will be focused on publishing original research articles and reviews on the latest findings concerning the mechanical characteristics of rocks under various construction and storage environments. Among the topics to be highlighted are the mechanical properties and fracture behaviour.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Mechanical properties and fracture behaviour of deep rock
• Rock failure behaviour under multi field coupling and multi-scale systems
• Dynamic failure characteristics and constitutive properties of deep rock
• Mechanical behaviours of rock fractures during shearing
• Energy evolution characteristics during rock fracturing
• Experimental or numerical simulation of rockbursts
• Failure mechanism of spalling in deep tunnels
• Rock and structure response under blast and impulsive loading
• Prevention and control of disasters in deep rock engineering