Derek Martin

• BSc, MEng, PhD
• Professor at University of Alberta

Major structures of the Site C Hydroelectric Project are founded in the Shaftesbury Shale. Ménard pressuremeter and plate load testing for those foundations was carried out in the 1980s near a prominent bedding plane at El. 415 m to establish the shale stiffness. The redesign of the Powerhouse and Spillway on a Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC) found...

Disturbance induced by stress relief has a significant effect on the laboratory properties of rocks in high in situ stress regions. A better understanding of its mechanism can help evaluate rock properties in regions such as the Tibetan Plateau. In this study, the progressive failure process of gneiss with high disturbance in the eastern Himalayas...

As part of the Site C hydroelectric project, bi-directional lateral load tests were carried out in two 2.6 m diameter drilled shafts to reliably determine the response of the Shaftesbury shale foundation at depth. Two 2.3 m diameter loading assemblies equipped with high capacity Osterberg load cells were concreted inside the shafts and were used to...

Major structures of the Site C hydroelectric project are founded on the Shaftesbury Shale. The 2010 redesign of these structures on a RCC foundation deepened the excavations to El. 375 m to take advantage of the increasing foundation stiffness with depth. In 2020, pressuremeter testing to El. 340 and two large scale split-lateral load tests between...

Open pit Design Acceptance Criteria (DAC) have been proposed and adopted by industry in the Guidelines for Open Pit Slope Design (2009) providing a consistent set of guidelines. Since publication of these guidelines, industry has acknowledged that the application of DAC should consider design confidence (ranging from highly uncertain greenfield sit...

A high degree of alteration causes swelling, disintegration and argillization of granite and thus weakens its physical and mechanical properties. Very few experimental studies, however, have been conducted to quantitatively characterize the strong-to-weak transition of the mechanical behaviours of granite affected by varying degrees of alteration....

The interpretation of pressuremeter test results in cohesive soils assumes that the soil is saturated and the rate of loading is such that undrained conditions apply. Pressuremeter tests in compacted soils or heavily overconsolidated clays may have a degree of saturation that is less than 100%. Consequently, the soil may undergo volume changes duri...

The characterizations of microfractures within shale, and their associations with bedding, mineralogy and loading, are important for shale gas exploration and related engineering safety. Research on this topic has been limited due to technological constraints; however, advances in scanning electron microscope (SEM) techniques allow for highly detai...

Open-pit slope engineering involves balancing economic imperatives and risk, where an optimum pit slope design seeks to safely steepen the pit slope angles to minimize the mining of waste, therefore maximizing ore recovery. Open-pit Design Acceptance Criteria (DAC) had been proposed and adopted by industry, and the Guidelines for Open Pit Slope Des...

Stability analysis of strain-softening slopes is carried out using the shear strength reduction method and Mohr-Coulomb model with degrading cohesion and friction angle. The effect of strain-softening behavior on the slope factor of safety is investigated by carrying out a series of analyses for various slope geometries and strength properties. Sta...

An analytical model of rock mass with non-persistent joints is utilized to develop linear and nonlinear failure criteria based on intact rock strength, joint shear strength and joint persistence. The analytical model matches the solutions for the strength of fracture-free and fully jointed rocks and provides a reasonable transition of strength for...

Natural variability of rock properties can significantly affect the strength of rock masses and factor of safety of slopes. The results of a comprehensive point load testing program showed that coefficient of variation of intact rock strength can reach unity in highly heterogeneous formations. Probabilistic numerical analysis was carried out to exp...

Since the passing of the Railway Safety and Improvement Act in 2008 there have been intensive efforts to develop and implement Positive Train Control (PTC) in the United States; an initiative that is being closely observed in Canada. While there are safety advantages inherent in a PTC-type system, the dispersed and remote nature of Canada’s railway...

A design procedure was developed for a relatively unknown slope stabilization technique consisting of a series of parallel sheet piles installed parallel to the direction of slope movement. This technique was introduced in Alberta by R.M. Hardy in the 1970s and is locally referred to as “Hardy Ribs.” A case study is discussed where Canadian Nationa...

Ground-based, interferometric, synthetic aperture radar (GB-InSAR) has been extensively and successfully used in the last few years for monitoring natural and man-made slopes. This technology allows for remote monitoring of slope deformations in the line-of-sight (LOS) between the instrument and the slope, providing a map of displacements in the LO...

This paper presents the creep behaviour of intact and remoulded specimens of fibrous peat obtained from a field site near Anzac, Alberta, Canada. The creep behaviour was investigated by means of long-term drained and undrained triaxial tests. The development of volumetric, axial, and undrained axial strain and strain rate during drained and undrain...

Rock fall hazard management typically requires efficient allocation of available resources for detailed hazard assessment and control. In mountainous terrain, remoteness and difficult access pose a challenge for resource allocation decision-making. In this paper, we evaluate a systematic approach for decision-making based on topographic susceptibil...

Description Get 14 peer-reviewed papers from the first-ever D18 symposium dedicated to the study of the properties and behavior of railroad ballast. Industry experts present their research on various best practices for field and laboratory ballast testing. Topics include

Description Get 14 peer-reviewed papers from the first-ever D18 symposium dedicated to the study of the properties and behavior of railroad ballast. Industry experts present their research on various best practices for field and laboratory ballast testing. Topics include

Ballast degradation is considered to be a primary factor that contributes to the development of track roughness, and as such it is important to develop efficient techniques to assess the condition of the ballast. Ground-penetrating radar is one method that has been applied in a variety of railway foundation studies including those attempting to non...

Transport Canada mandated in 2014 that Canadian railways conduct risk assessments for the transport of dangerous goods along corridors considered critical based on the type and quantities of dangerous goods transported (key routes). This regulation resulted from the public concern associated with recent rail incidents involving the release of dange...

The 10-mile Slide is contained within an ancient earthflow located in British Columbia, Canada. The landslide has been moving slowly for over 40 years, requiring regular maintenance work along where a highway and a railway track cross the sliding mass. Since 2013, the landslide has shown signs of retrogression. Monitoring prisms were installed on a...

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) maintains the Rail Occurrence Database System (RODS). This database contains information on all types of rail occurrences including derailments that must be reported by all Canadian railway operators. This paper analyzes the derailments that occurred on Canadian main track network between 2001 and 201...

The progressive degradation of railway ballast is often cited as a primary factor that contributes to the development of track roughness, while ballast renewal (undercutting) attempts to manage its long-term development. Soft subgrades have been shown to strongly influence track geometry and are a contributing factor that has not been considered du...

The 10-mile Slide is a 750 000 m3 earth landslide north of Lillooet, in the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Down-hole instrumentation suggest that the deforming mass is sliding along a through-going basal shear zone paralleling the slide surface. Monitoring also shows a surging deformation pattern (up to 10 mm/day) not associated with ground...

The sensitivity of three low-frequency (<1 GHz) ground-penetrating radar attributes commonly used to infer the amount of fines present within railway ballast was evaluated using synthetic datasets. Variations in ballast thickness, saturation, and subballast material type are not often considered during laboratory or small-scale (few kilometres of t...

Rock falls represent a large percentage of landslide-related hazards reported by Canadian railways in mountainous terrain. A 54.7 km-long section of railway through the Canadian Cordillera is examined that experiences, on average, 18 rock falls each year. An approach for rock fall hazard management is developed based on quantified risk. The approac...

No associated manuscripts

Blasted and crushed rock produced at Canadian National Railway's (CN Rail) McAbee Pit in British Columbia is the primary source of ballast for CN Rail in Western Canada. To reduce track maintenance costs, which are influenced by the distance from the McAbee pit to the area of track being maintained, CN Rail is evaluating the characteristics of crus...

The purpose of the research presented within this paper has been to investigate the impact of undrained loading conditions and the rate of movement on the strength of a heavily overconsolidated Pleistocene glaciolacustrine clay. Shear planes within this clay are implicated in the movement of many large landslides within the Thompson River valley, n...

The mechanisms that result in the settlement of structures constructed on peat foundations have been the subject of numerous investigations. A recent study of the behavior of the peat subgrade showed that gas bubbles within the peat strongly influence the pore pressure. The thermal expansion of these gas bubbles results in an increase in pore press...

Railway regulators require that track geometry measurements meet a specific set of minimum safety thresholds. A proper interpretation of track geometry survey data is fundamental for the detection of track exceeding these thresholds and in need of corrective maintenance. Irregular track geometry independent of the minimum safety thresholds can also...

Large-scale tests were performed to compare the lateral resistance that develops between ties (or sleepers) and two types of ballast material. Ballast Type 1 consists of crushed, angular to sub-angular particles, and is an important source of ballast material in Western Canada. Ballast Type 2, crushed Gravel Ballast, contains rounded and crushed an...

Slope Model is a discontinuous approach capable of incorporating the geometry and geomechanical properties of discontinuities explicitly within the rock mass. Two objectives for its development are the back analysis of rock slope failures to understand their mechanisms, and investigate the contribution of intact rock bridges in the stability of roc...

The Ripley Landslide is a soil slide moving on a fully developed, sub-horizontal, shear surface. The landslide represents a hazard for two important railway lines across its toe. The landslide is being monitored by an array of displacement measurement systems including GPS units, a ShapeAccelArray (SAA), satellite InSAR, and crack extension metres,...

Predicting the ground response for tunnels in weak shales remains challenging. Predicting the ground response is challenged by difficulties in characterising the material, and our ability to predict deformations that are driven by coupled hydromechanical processes, when this material yields. The techniques that are used for characterising weak shal...

The Christensen criterion, originally introduced in materials science, has a simple mathematical form and uniaxial tensile and compressive strength as the only parameters, making it an attractive candidate for rock engineering purposes. In this study, the applicability of the criterion to rock materials is examined. Explicit equations for applicati...

As part of the City of Edmonton's light rail transit expansion, twin 6.5 m diameter oval shaped tunnels were constructed using conventional tunnelling methods. The geology of the site consists predominately of a hard, fissured cohesive till unit. The tunnel face construction was sequenced as top header, bench and invert excavations. At its narrowes...

This paper presents the pore pressure behaviour observed within peat beneath a newly constructed railway embankment. Piezometers installed at different depths beneath the structure showed episodic increases in pore pressure above hydrostatic pressure followed by a rapid pore pressure decrease. It was postulated that this fluctuation in pore pressur...

The occurrence of some rock slides requires the breakage of intact rock for the formation of a through-going sliding surface. This breakage of intact rock is associated with deformation processes and progressive failure of rock slopes. Numerical approaches incorporating the geometry and geomechanical properties of discontinuities and intact rock in...

Indurated clay formations are under consideration as potential host rock formations for the disposal of radioactive waste in several countries. The favourable features of such formations for deep geological repositories include an excellent hydraulic barrier function, high capacity for dissolved radionuclide retention and considerable self-sealing...

Relationships between weather conditions and rock fall occurrences have been acknowledged in the past, but seldom have such relationships been quantified and published. Rock falls are frequent hazards along transportation corridors through mountainous terrain, and predicting hazardous rock fall periods based on weather conditions can enhance mitiga...

The performance of instrumentation in moving landslides has always been a challenge in the geotechnical industry. Movements can cause issues relating to shearing of cables or the breaking of grout used for installation. The Ripley Landslide near Ashcroft, B.C., Canada has been previously investigated using sand-pack piezometers and slope inclinomet...

An instrumented section of a 10-m-diameter circular shaft located at a depth of 1.2 km in an average quality rock mass was back analyzed to establish the rock mass behavior. Extensometers were installed radially at four locations and provided the primary data for the back analyses. Three- and two-dimensional continuum models were analyzed using the...

This paper presents the results of a study investigating the behaviour of peat subgrade beneath a railway embankment. Instrumentation was installed to measure the temperature, pore water pressure, and vertical settlement at different depths within peat strata over a three-year period. The pore pressures within the peat subgrade were observed to inc...

The benefits of quantitative risk assessments for land- slide management have been discussed and illustrated in several publications. However, there still are some challenges in its appli- cation for low-probability, high-magnitude events. These chal- lenges are associated with the difficulties in populating our models for risk calculations, which...

Design of rock fall protection structures requires information about the rock fall volume distribution. When this information is not available, rock fall volumes can be estimated based on structural information about the rock fall sources. This paper examines a rock fall source where known measurable rock falls occur. As is common, the source was i...

Opalinus Clay is the designated host rock for high-level radioactive waste in Switzerland. Its geomechanical behavior during excavation works has been extensively studied over the past two decades at the underground research laboratory (URL) at Mont Terri in Northwestern Switzerland. Tunnel convergence measurements were compiled from 17 locations a...

Railways across the Canadian Cordillera have long his-tories of losses associated with ground hazards. The hazards most frequently reported are rockfalls, which are ubiquitous along the steep rock cuts required to accommodate the railway alignment. Several hazard control measures can be adopted in rockfall areas. However, when rockfall frequencies...

Slope hazards are common along railway corridors through mountainous terrain. In particular, rockfalls have been known to cause operation delays and damage to railway structures on a regular basis. The relationship between rockfall occurrences and weather conditions has been acknowledged before, but seldom has it been quantified. In this regard, de...

The interpretation of pressuremeter test results in cohesive soils assumes that the soil is saturated and the rate of loading is such that undrained conditions apply. Pressuremeter tests in compacted soils or heavily overconsolidated clays may have a degree of saturation that is less than 100%. Consequently, the soil may undergo volume changes duri...

This article focuses on the uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) of homogeneous and heterogeneous rocks. Critical factors impacting the UCS of rocks are reviewed and then separate assessments of UCS data from homogeneous and heterogeneous rocks are presented. The variability (coefficient of variation) of UCS test results for homogeneous rocks is fou...

Railway alignments through the Canadian Cordillera are constantly exposed to slope instabilities. Proactive mitigation strategies have been in place for a few decades now, and instability record keeping has been recognized as an important aspect of them. Such a proactive strategy has enhanced the industry’s ca- pacity to manage slope risks, and som...

An in situ explosion test on dynamic responses of one single surface slope (stepped slope) of open-pit iron mine in Miyun County, Beijing has been carried out. The slope consists of gneiss and magnetite quartzite with blocky structure and its surface is strongly disturbed due to excavation and explosion. Four explosion recorders have been used as d...

The Thompson River, south of Ashcroft, British Columbia, Canada is a particularly unique area where complex glacial geology, active geomorphic processes and critical infrastructure (both major national rail lines – CPR and CN) intersect with and are affected by a long history of slope instability. Well documented landslides along a +10 km stretch o...

The initiation and propagation of failure in intact rock are a matter of fundamental importance in rock engineering. At low confining pressures, tensile fracturing initiates in samples at 40% to 60% of the uniaxial compressive strength and as loading continues, and these tensile fractures increase in density, ultimately coalescing and leading to st...

Fourteen large landslides have occurred within a 10 km stretch of the Thompson River Valley south of Ashcroft, British Columbia. The slides have had movements ranging from rapid (metres per hour) to very slow, and the largest slides have volumes approaching 15.0 × 10⁶ m³. Investigations of these slides have been conducted since the early failures o...

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the role of peat fibers in the development of anisotropic stiffness and strength within peat samples taken from below three Canadian National Railway embankments across Canada. These sites include two from northern Alberta on the Edson and Lac-La-Biche subdivisions and one from the Lévis subd...

The Ripley Landslide is located along a strategic railway transportation corridor in British Columbia. It moves along a discrete shear surface at a rate between 25 and 180 mm/year, making it a very slow landslide. The importance of a proactive risk mitigation strategy for the landslide lies in the potential consequences to the railway transportatio...

Landslides in British Columbia are costly geological hazards that have challenged the major rail companies for over 120 years. Presented here are preliminary results and analyses of fiber Bragg grating and Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry monitoring of a deforming trackside lock-block retaining wall on the Ripley Slide in the Thompson Ri...

The plate-load test (PLT) is widely performed at large dam sites to determine the rock mass deformability. Analytical relations based on the theory of elasticity, as suggested by the International Society for Rock Mechanics and the American Society for Testing and Materials test standards, are commonly used to interpret the test results and calcula...

The Äspö Expansion project required the excavation of approximately 300mof newexperimental tunnels on the 410 Level. At this depth there is a hydraulic head of approximately 365 m. The project design required that the maximum allowable drawdownnot exceed 50mrelative to the initial conditions. Borehole inflow tests carried out in the pilot holes bef...

Posiva Oy and SKB (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB) tested the suitability a new LVDT-Cell (Linear Variable Displacement Transducer-Cell) to measure the induced stresses in the vicinity of an excavated surface and further to use these results to interpret the in situ state of stress. It utilises the overcoring methodology, measuring the radial conve...

Crack initiation in uniaxial compressive loading of rocks occurs well before the peak strength is reached. The factors that may influence the onset of cracking and possible initiating mechanisms were explored using a discrete element numerical approach. The numerical approach was based on grain-based model that utilized the Voronoi tessellation sch...

Rock falls are frequent hazards for railroad corridors cutting through mountainous areas. Mitigation of the associated risk depends on estimations of the rock fall spatial distribution, falling block velocity and height when reaching the track or railroad alignment. Where no rock fall event records exist, lack of data makes these estimations extrem...

This paper presents the deformation and pore-water pressure response within peat foundations below three different railway embankments in response to cyclic heavy axle loading. The study sites include two at Canadian National (CN) Railway's Edson and Lac-La-Biche subdivisions in northern Alberta, and one at CN′s Lévis subdivision in southeastern Qu...

The stress–strain data from 376 laboratory tests carried out on samples of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks were analyzed to establish the onset of microcracking in compression, referred to as the Crack Initiation (CI) stress. A statistical approach was used to find the geological parameters influencing crack initiation stress. Among vari...

A successful slope management program depends on understanding the interaction between the potential slope failure and the elements at risk. This interaction defines the magnitude and likelihood of the potential consequences, which in turn defines the need for allocating resources for risk mitigation. The interaction can be divided into the probabi...

In analyzing intact rock strength, an important factor is heterogeneity. At the grain-scale, intact crystalline rock consists of a variety of mineral grains of different sizes and shapes. These features give rise to the micro-scale heterogeneity. A three dimensional Grain Based universal distinct element Model (3D-GBM) was developed to generate a d...

Tensile stress plays a critical role in core disking. Three dimensional numerical analyses were carried out to determine the distribution of theses tensile stresses in the vicinity of the advancing drill bit. A methodology was developed to examine the spatial distribution of the maximum, minimum, and average, maximum tensile stress. A criterion bas...

There are two contributors to rock mass strength: (1) the strength of the intact rock and (2) the strength of the fractures or flaws. The flaws in a rock can occur at several scales: (1) centimetre scale where the micro-defects are healed with infilling that is usually weaker than the intact rock and (2) metre-scale where the fractures generally la...

A Deep Geologic Repository (DGR) for the long-term management of low and intermediate level radioactive waste, generated by Ontario power Generation (OPG), is currently in the licensing phase. The repository itself is to be located with the argillaceous Cobourg Limestone Formation at a depth of approximately 680m beneath the Bruce nuclear site in t...

A three dimensional constitutive model is formulated for deformation analysis of jointed rock masses containing up to three joint sets with arbitrary spatial configurations. A representative elementary volume (REV) that represents the deformational response of the rock mass is defined and the constitutive relationships are developed based on superp...

Microcrack volumes in 87 granite-cored samples, obtained in the depth range from ground surface to 1000 m at Pinawa, Canada and Forsmark, Sweden, were quantified from stress–strain curves to assess the increase in microcrack volume with depth. Digital image analysis of 9 of these samples was used to examine the characteristics of these microcracks....

Laboratory testing of rocks is traditionally carried out to determine the peak strength using the ISRM Suggested Methods or other suitable standards. However, it is well known that in low-porosity crystalline rocks there are at least three distinct stages of compressive loading that can be readily identified if the stress–strain response is monitor...

Landslides usually leave topographic features such as scarps, cracks, and displaced materials on the ground, which differ from adjacent areas without landsliding. Identification of these features would provide information for landslide hazard assessments in which landslide hazards are determined based on historical evidence. We have delineated geom...

At approximately 23:00 on 15 October 1957, the Alaska Highway was closed by movement of the north anchor block of the Peace River highway suspension bridge, at Taylor, BC, Canada. The two north spans of the bridge collapsed thirteen hours later. There were no injuries. Ten photographs depicting the collapse occurring are reproduced here. The north...

Presentation. Prepared and narrated by BGN Miller

Narrated presentation

Block toppling in natural rock slopes has been under investigation since the 1970’s. De Freitas and Watters (1973) introduced the term “toppling” to describe the movements of rock slopes by rotation in steeply dipping beds. The Lornex pit case history from British Columbia (Canada) was chosen to study the effect of mining on the stability of toppli...

This paper presents the results of a laboratory testing program involving consolidated undrained triaxial tests and direct shear tests on remoulded peat, remoulded peat fibre, and Shelby specimens of peat obtained from a field site located in the Edson subdivision of the Canadian National railway in Alberta, Canada. These results were analyzed with...

To understand and predict the in situ brittle rock mass damage process induced by a coupled thermo-mechanical loading, the knowledge of rock mass yielding strength, scaling relationship between laboratory and in situ and microstructure characterization is required. Difficulties have been recognized due to the seldom availability of in situ experime...

This paper discusses some fundamental rock mechanical issues relevant for the construction and the design of a nuclear waste underground repository associated with the short-term "excavation phase" and long-term "open drift phase". Of particular interest is the development of the pore pressure field around a repository tunnel in the short-term, the...

The disposal of used nuclear fuel using the KBS-3 concept requires the excavation of thousands of 1.8-m diameter 8 m deep boreholes. The heat generating spent fuel placed in these boreholes will increase the stresses on the boundary of these boreholes. Three in-situ experiments have been carried out to assess the performance of the borehole wall as...