| In the design of an underground excavation, the engineer uses analyses to quantify and understand the interaction between excavation geometry, rock mass properties and stresses. The analyses are typically complicated by the need to consider variability of each model parameter's values, three-dimensional geometric effects, and the integration of information from multi-disciplinary datasets. A major goal of this thesis is therefore to rationalize the analysis process used to represent underground excavation geometry, conduct numerical stress analyses, and visualize analysis data.; The first issue considered in this thesis is the modeling of underground excavation geometry for the purpose of performing three-dimensional boundary element stress analysis. Various geometric modeling algorithms and techniques are enhanced for the application to underground excavation geometry and the concurrent creation of a triangulated boundary element mesh. The second focus of this thesis is the visualization of underground mine datasets. In particular, a paradigm is developed that allows the efficient visualization of stress analysis data, in conjunction with other mine datasets such as seismic event locations, event density, event energy density and geotomographic velocity imaging datasets. Several examples are used in the thesis to illustrate practical application of the developed concepts. |
