Characterization of cavities in marble from automatic monitoring of hydraulic rotary drilling in ground investigation

This paper presents a case study on characterization of cavities in marble in karst terrain. A recently developed insitu technique, namely Drilling Process Monitoring (DPM) is applied in the cavity characterization. This technique is able to characterize the mechanical strength properties and their spatial distribution along the drillhole via automatically and continuously monitoring the full process of hydraulic rotary drilling in real time during site characterization. According to the monitored data of the drilling parameters in time, this technique can efficiently and sensitively characterize either tiny discontinuities or massive cavities present in marbles. The DPM results are compared against the results from core logging in the case study. The results ofthis case study show the DPM data can provide more factual data on cavities.