Introduction
All rock masses contain discontinuities such as bedding planes, joints, shear zones and
faults. At shallow depth, where stresses are low, failure of the intact rock material is
minimal and the behaviour of the rock mass is controlled by sliding on the
discontinuities. In order to analyse the stability of this system of individual rock blocks,
it is necessary to understand the factors that control the shear strength of the
discontinuities which separate the blocks. These questions are addressed in the discussion
that follows.
Shear strength of planar surfaces
Suppose that a number of samples of a rock are obtained for shear testing. Each sample
contains a through-going bedding plane that is cemented; in other words, a tensile force
would have to be applied to the two halves of the specimen in order to separate them. The
bedding plane is absolutely planar, having no surface irregularities or undulations. As
illustrated in Figure 1, in a shear test each specimen is subjected to a stress Vn normal to
the bedding plane, and the shear stress W, required to cause a displacement G, is measured.
The shear stress will increase rapidly until the peak strength is reached. This corresponds
to the sum of the strength of the cementing material bonding the two halves of the
bedding plane together and the frictional resistance of the matching surfaces. As the
displacement continues, the shear stress will fall to some residual value that will then
remain constant, even for large shear displacements.
Plotting the peak and residual shear strengths for different normal stresses results in the
two lines illustrated in Figure 1. For planar discontinuity surfaces the experimental points
will generally fall along straight lines. The peak strength line has a slope of I and an
intercept of c on the shear strength axis. The residual strength line has a slope of Ir.
The relationship between the peak shear strength Wp and the normal stress Vn can be
represented by the Mohr-Coulomb equation: