Numerical modelling of rock mass with spatially varying material properties

Rock mass is found to be mostly heterogeneous, anisotropic and discontinuous in nature and its strength and deformation behaviour is usually highly variable. This highly variable and spatially varying rock mass properties are attempted to be modelled in the present study using the random field modelling to characterize the material. A suitable property correlation function is adopted in the analysis namely uniform and lognormal distributions. FLAC is used to implement the model and study the effect of the corresponding material property variations. Special FISH functions were written for a combined approach of Monte Carlo simulation with variation of material properties. The implemented model used to analyze slope, where there is significant variation in the material proprieties, demonstrates the efficiency and usefulness of the model.