Shear stress relaxation behavior of rock discontinuities with different joint roughness coefficient and stress histories

Stress relaxation is an important time-dependent behavior of rock mass. To investigate the stress relaxation behavior and the influence of stress history and surface morphology on the stress relaxation of rock discontinuity, iso-stress cyclic relaxation tests and shear stress relaxation tests with loading–unloading stress histories were conducted on artificial rock discontinuity samples and natural rock discontinuity samples. The characteristics...