Geomechanics
Geomechanics studies how soil and rock deform, flow, and fail under forces and changing environmental conditions.
Effective stress: The stress carried by a porous material's solid framework after accounting for pore-fluid pressure. Pore pressure changes how much of an applied load the soil or rock skeleton carries.
Stress (mechanics): The internal force per unit area acting within a material. Stress describes the loads that drive geological deformation and failure.
Slope stability: The assessment of whether a natural or engineered slope can resist sliding or collapse. Geomechanical strength and groundwater conditions determine whether slopes remain stable.
Geology: The science of Earth's materials, structure, history, and processes. Geology supplies the materials and structures whose mechanical behavior geomechanics analyzes.
Multiphysics: The modeling of interactions among multiple physical processes within one system. Subsurface predictions often require coupling deformation with fluid flow, heat, or chemical change.
Constitutive model: A mathematical relation connecting a material's stresses, strains, and sometimes their rates or history. These equations translate loading into predicted deformation for particular geological materials.
Strain: A dimensionless measure of deformation relative to a material's original dimensions. Strain quantifies the shape and volume changes caused by stress.
Rock mechanics: The study of the mechanical behavior of intact rock and rock masses. It is the geomechanics branch most directly applied to tunnels, mines, and rock slopes.
Geophysics: The study of Earth using physical principles and measurements, including seismic and gravitational methods. Geophysics often infers subsurface properties from signals, while geomechanics focuses on forces and deformation.
Scale effect (geology): The variation of measured geological properties or behavior with the scale of observation. Rock-mass strength can differ sharply from laboratory measurements on small samples.