The behaviour of rocks on breakup into fragments is important to understand for a wide variety of applications from mitigating the risks of landslides and coastal erosion to optimising mining and quarrying techniques.

Virtual Geoscience Workbench Launched

The behaviour of rocks on breakup into fragments is particularly important to understand for a wide variety of applications from mitigating the risks of landslides and coastal erosion to optimising mining and quarrying techniques. Calculating how rocks will break, and how those fragments will behave under forces such as gravity is, however, exceedingly complex since it involves modelling a very large number of irregularly shaped particles that are interacting with each other, moving and fragmenting.

The Department of Earth Science and Engineering has just launched a modelling package, the Virtual Geoscience Workbench (VGW), specially designed to simulate the complex behaviour of particulate, granular, blocky fracturing and fragmenting rock systems. The Workbench is the culmination of a 5 year, £0.8 million project funded by EPSRC and was led by Dr John-Paul Latham of ESE and Prof. Antonio Munjiza, of Queen Mary College, London. The VGW provides a modelling platform by which scientists and engineers can model the behaviour of a wide range of problems in rock fracturing and particulates, and is open source, allowing the code to grow and develop by contributions from users.

VGW can be applied to address many key industrial and environmental problems. If you live on the coast, for example, the mechanical behaviour of rocks could make the difference between you staying high and dry or not, since around 17% of the UK coastline is currently being eroded at rates of up to 2 m each year. The optimal design of coastal defences needs the interaction of waves with fracturing and fractured rocks to be understood. VGW allows such fluid coupled problems to be modelled in detail.

The behaviour of avalanches of fractured rocks is another important problem that VGW is designed to address. Predicting when rock avalanching will occur and the destructive power and pathways that many particles will take has many obvious applications in civil engineering, however, not all avalanches are unwanted. In mining and quarrying avalanches can be a bonus since fragmentation of rocks during collapse provides and efficient means of liberating resources such as ore minerals or of producing stones of the right size for industrial aggregate. Predicting rock break-up, flow into draw points, through hoppers and processing circuits is particularly important for design and optimisation in minerals engineering.

“It is the first time that a single modelling package can be used to study such a wide range of problems in the mechanical behaviour of fragmenting and fragmented rocks and this is because we can handle particles of any shape”, says Dr Latham. “The VGW will give engineers the ability to calculate the results of their engineering solutions without the need for costly trials and experiments. For scientists it provides a tool to investigate the mechanical behaviour of rocks and help them interpret Earth history.”

The Virtual Geoscience Workbench is available for free download from the VGW website.

• VGW website

Associated Personnel

• John-Paul Latham