A hybrid continuous-discontinuous model for predicting rock failure in mining

Rock failure has important applications in mining, such as mechanical fragmentation or excavation, rock blasting, slope stability and tunnel reinforcement. Correspondingly, rock failure has been one of the hottest research topics in the field of mining geomechanics during past decades. With rapid development of computational geomechanics, numerical method has become a powerful tool for predicting rock failure in mining. The existing numerical method for predicting rock failure can be classified as continuum method, discontinuum method and coupled continuum-discontinuum method.