Effects of external dynamic disturbances and structural plane on rock fracturing around deep underground cavern

Abstract The occurrence of disasters in deep mining engineering has been confirmed to be closely related to the external dynamic disturbances and geological discontinuities. Thus, a combined finite-element method was employed to simulate the failure process of an underground cavern, which provided insights into the failure mechanism of deep hard rock affected by factors such as the dynamic stress-wave amplitudes, disturbance direction, and dip angles of the structural plane. The crack-propagation process, stress-field distribution, displacement, velocity of failed rock, and failure zone around the circular cavern were analyzed to identify the dynamic response and failure properties of the underground structures. The simulation results indicate that the dynamic disturbance direction had less influence on the dynamic response for the constant in situ stress state, while the failure intensity and damage range around the cavern always exhibited a monotonically increasing trend with an increase in the dynamic load. The crack distribution around the circular cavern exhibited an asymmetric pattern, possibly owing to the stress-wave reflection behavior and attenuation effect along the propagation route. Geological discontinuities significantly affected the stability of nearby caverns subjected to dynamic disturbances, during which the failure intensity exhibited the pattern of an initial increase followed by a decrease with an increase in the dip angle of the structural plane. Additionally, the dynamic disturbance direction led to variations in the crack distribution for specific structural planes and stress states. These results indicate that the failure behavior should be the integrated response of the excavation unloading effect, geological conditions, and external dynamic disturbances.