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ROCK MASS CLASSIFICATION - REVIEW | ROCK TUNNELLING


● Choice 2: “Country”. Here participants were able to indicate in which country they have applied the RMCS chosen under Choice 1.


● Choice 3: “Application of System”. Here, participants could choose what they have used the system for: Tunnels and Caverns; Slopes—Civil Engineering; Slopes—Mining; Slopes—Natural; Underground Mines; Foundations; and, Oil and Gas reservoirs.


A combination of answers would be in the form: RMCS— country—application. One possible combination would be: Q-System—Norway—Tunnels and Caverns. After submitting a combination, participants were thanked for their contribution and encouraged to submit more suggestions if they knew additional combinations. The first survey was open from September to


November 2022 and preliminary results were presented at the Congress of the International Society of Rock Mechanics (ISRM) in Salzburg, Austria, in 2023 (Erharter et al. 2023). The first survey collected a total of 798 suggestions. The second survey was launched to collect more responses and was open from October 2023 to February 2024 and collected another 435 suggestions, leading to a total of 1233 suggestions. The top 10 countries in terms of submitted RMCS


suggestions were Australia, India, Canada, Spain, Austria, Indonesia, China, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Pakistan. The inhomogeneous number of suggestions per country restricts analyses of absolute numbers of RMCS globally as the numbers of submitted votes depend mostly on the achieved outreach of the survey and no other geographical numbers such as population sizes. The collected suggestions had to be slightly post-


processed to facilitate further analyses. This required harmonising new suggestions of RMCS as a response to ‘Choice 1’ (see above) and included: (i) removing 12 unusable suggestions that were not connectable to any identifiable system; and, (ii) merging of suggestions that refer to the same RMCS. All RMCS that are included in this study are given


in Table 1, of which 25 were actively included in the surveys and an additional 12 were included due to participants’ feedback. This list of 37 RMCS is considered comprehensive and was used for further analyses in this study. The anonymised results (i.e., without response time and original ID of participant and after the above- described processing) of the surveys are given in supplementary data to the original full paper.


4 INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF ROCK MASS CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS The surveys gave a distribution of RMCS for each application and for each country where submissions were handed in. In contrast to Erharter et al. (2023) where the resulting maps only contained the “majority RMCS” for each country, i.e., the RMCS that is used most in the country, the results were shown in pie charts for every country, such as in Figure 2, which is one of the maps and concerns Tunnelling & Underground Mining.


A further map of pie charts concerns Slope


Applications. Due to only 68 submissions for the application Foundations for 30 different countries, no dedicated map was produced. The application Oil and Gas reservoirs was excluded from the study as there was only one submission. The map of the international distribution of RMCS


for underground applications, Figure 2, contains results for 69 countries where suggestions were submitted. It can be seen that the internationally dominating systems are the Q-system (Barton et al. 1974), RMR (Bieniawski 1973), and GSI (Hoek and Brown 1997). However, it is open whether participants use GSI for rock mass classification or only as an intermediate step for rock mass characterisation in the geomechanical design workflow. The pie charts allow a close-up assessment of


individual countries. There are mainly two types of countries (based on countries with > 20 submissions in total): (i)


countries that split into thirds with two-thirds belonging to two main systems and one-third being comprised of several other systems (e.g., Australia, India, Canada, Austria, Turkey, Pakistan, US, Mexico); and,


(ii) countries where one system dominates with ≥ 50% (e.g., Spain (RMR), Indonesia (RMR), Kazakhstan (Q), China (A-BQ), UK (Q), Italy (Q), Greece (GSI), and Norway (Q)).


The map for the distribution of RMCS for slope application contains responses from 78 countries. GSI seems to be the favoured system for slope application in general and also dominates in several countries, e.g., Australia, Papua New Guinea, Austria, and Turkey. A much more colourful picture emerges compared to that for underground applications with, for example, some countries showing a remarkable variety of systems, e.g., India where three-fourths of the submissions indicated the Continuous Slope Mass Rating (Tomás et al. 2007), Slope Mass Rating (Romana 1985) and RMR, respectively, and the last quarter consists of various other systems. Another example is Mexico, where a third of the submissions indicate the use of GSI, but the rest include RMR, Q-Slope (Barton and Bar 2015), Slope Stability Assessment Methodology (SSAM) (McQuillan et al. 2018), etc., or Peru, where one-third goes to RMR, but the rest is comprised of six other systems. As in the map for underground applications, the map


for slope applications shows that some countries have two dominating systems, and in several others, such as: Kazakhstan where one-third goes to GSI and RMR, respectively, and the rest goes to five other systems; or Spain where two-thirds go to the Slope Mass Rating and GSI, respectively. The other third is comprised of five other systems. Figure 3 shows bar charts for each investigated


application except for Oil and Gas reservoirs, which show in how many countries one RMCS achieved more votes than all other RMCS (i.e., majority vote). In case


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