Application Development in Classification of Rock Mass Quality on Tunnel Engineering

Classification of rock mass quality is the basis of stability assessment, which plays a very important role on tunnel engineering. Especially, the construction of railways, with a series of new characteristic such as “Long, Large and Deep”, has progressed at great speed and has gradually extended to mountainous areas at the background of western development strategy. No matter whether in investigation, design and construction, classification of rock mass quality costs much time and effort. Based on summary and analysis of a variety of classification methods, this paper establishes a general index system and criteria of zone division on tunnel surrounding rock and develops a user-friendly, convenient program which can make zone division of surrounding rock and classification of rock mass quality become easily and diagram exported interactively. The case study shows that the results are in a good agreement with the actual situation. The proposed method should be more feasible for future tunnel construction and for suggestions of tunnel support design in the mountain areas of China.