3D In Situ Stress Estimation by Inverse Analysis of Tectonic Strains

Abstract

The determination of a 3D engineering-scale in situ stress field is essential in underground rock mechanics and engineering. The inverse analysis method is a useful technique to determine the in situ stress around the zone of interest. This paper presents a new approach with tectonic strains based on traditional stress-based or displacement-based inverse analysis. In this approach, there are only six tectonic strain variables at the boundary to be optimized, which does not need to select the stress or displacement boundary conditions as the traditional inverse analysis. Therefore, the proposed approach has a better clarity. The proposed approach is applied to the determination of the engineering-scale in situ stress of the underground powerhouses of the Three Gorges Project, and the results are compared with those obtained by traditional approaches. The comparison further shows that the proposed method has better accuracy than traditional methods.