Yilin Gui
Zhiqiang Yin
Kun Du- 1School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- 2School of Mining Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, Anhui, China
- 3School of Resources and Safety Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China
Editorial on the Research Topic
Deep rock mass engineering: Excavation, monitoring, and control
With the development of the social economy, the depth of underground excavation has seen a significant increase in the fields of mining, tunnelling, hydropower, nuclear waste deep geological storage, and underground protection engineering. In mining engineering, for instance, nearly 200 metal mines have mining depth of more than 1 km, and the deepest one has reached more than 4 km below the ground surface (Li et al., 2017). The excavation of rocks in deep ground is subjected to the state of complicated circumferential loadings, for example, the high in situ stress, the high ground temperature, the high hydraulic pressure (high gas pressure), in addition to the dynamic disturbance caused by blasting and mechanical excavation (Zhang and Zhao 2014; Huang et al.). Therefore, the excavation process may cause rockburst, coal and gas outburst, sudden fracture of rock mass and other dynamic phenomena, and cause severe engineering disasters. Therefore, in deep rock excavation engineering, the description of dynamic disaster response induced by excavation, the exploration of hidden disaster sources, and disaster forecasting and control have become the key technologies.
Within this context, continuous progress needs to be done to improve the safety performance of deep rock excavation. To meet the demand of engineering and academic communities in this topic, a Research Topic “Deep Rock Mass Engineering: Excavation, Monitoring, and Control” was proposed to the renowned journal Frontiers in Earth Science. The aim of this topic was to call for the state-of-the-art research in deep rock mass excavation, particularly in mining engineering, tunnelling, petroleum (gas) engineering and general rock mechanics, and to pulse the research trend in deep rock engineering.
It was a great honour to be invited to serve as a Guest Editor for this Research Topic. Upon the open of this topic, it was even more privileged to receive so great response from relevant academic communities. In total 21 papers collected and published in this Topic. A wide range of research was presented from novel laboratory testing (e.g., Liu et al.; Zhao and Niu; Liu et al.), robust numerical modelling (e.g., Hu et al.; Zhang et al.; Zhu et al.) and new development of models (e.g., Huang et al., 2022, Bu et al.) to case studies (e.g., Wu et al.; Li et al.; Liu et al.).
It was hoped that this special topic would serve as a small but thought-provoking collection for the community through the state-of-the-art review, introducing the new technologies in the industry practices and techniques used in the research field as well as insight to the future of deep rock mass engineering.
Author contributions
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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References
Huang, X., Xu, N., Wu, W., Xiao, P., Dong, L., and Li, B. (2022). Instability of an intersecting fault-dyke system during deep rock excavation. Int. J. Rock Mech. Min. Sci. 153, 105087. doi:10.1016/j.ijrmms.2022.105087
Li, X., Gong, F., Tao, M., Dong, L., Du, K., Ma, C., et al. (2017). Failure mechanism and coupled static-dynamic loading theory in deep hard rock mining: A review. J. Rock Mech. Geotechnical Eng. 9, 767–782. doi:10.1016/j.jrmge.2017.04.004
Keywords: mining engineering, rockburst, rock mechanics, rock excavation, deep rock mass engineering
Citation: Gui Y, Yin Z and Du K (2022) Editorial: Deep rock mass engineering: Excavation, monitoring, and control. Front. Earth Sci. 10:1047612. doi: 10.3389/feart.2022.1047612
Received: 18 September 2022; Accepted: 26 September 2022;
Published: 07 October 2022.
Edited and reviewed by:
Candan Gokceoglu, Hacettepe University, TurkeyCopyright © 2022 Gui, Yin and Du. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Yilin Gui, yilin.gui@qut.edu.au
†These authors have contributed equally to this work