Theoretical and field studies of coupled hydromechanical behaviour of fractured rocks—1. Development and verification of a numerical simulator

Abstract Analyses of hydromechanical behaviour of fractured rocks requires the use of numerical methods, such as the ROCMAS code developed at LBL. We have developed a new version of this simulator which uses mixed Newton-Raphson linearization within an incremental configuration. This code, that is named ROCMAS II, was verified against: (1) a semi-analytic solution; and (2) against its predecessor ROCMAS which uses a direct iteration linearization scheme. This new coupled phenomenological model has been used successfully in a validation study of a field experiment which is reported in Part 2 [Int. J. Rock Mech. Min. Sci. & Geomech. Abstr.29, 411–419 (1992)]. The verified ROCMAS II with its new feature such as an incremental set-up, the strain-softening and dilating shear, and hyperbolic closure joint model and the new linearization scheme, allows more realistic simulations of a host of rock mechanical problems in saturated rocks. Furthermore, the ROCMAS II set-up provides a basis upon which procedures for general treatment of various kinds of material non-linearity can be built.