Estimation of the volume of a rock layer using kriging method for energy efficient excavation

Abstract

It is proven fact that the efficiency of earthwork hugely affects the overall infrastructure construction project in terms of cost and time. Accuracy of earthwork estimation, especially the estimation of a rock layer directly affects the overall productivity since rock layer excavation requires additional rock breaking process to break down the rock layer into manageable smaller pieces. In order to make a decision on the construction method in the construction area, earthwork engineers must have an intuitive understanding of the distribution of underground rock strata. The only available way to estimate rock layers is acquiring boring data from an actual earthwork site and interpolate each layer. Accurate modeling of the rock layer is of utmost important process during earthwork estimation for planning energy efficient excavation. This study used Kriging interpolation, as an important research content of geological three-dimensional visualization to accurately create rock layer. Kriging interpolation not only considers the spatial relationship between variables, but also takes into account the structural and stochastic characteristics of variables, so that it can fully represent the structural information of regionalized variables. The accuracy of rock mass calculation is analyzed by means of actual dataset from a test site, and it showed that the accuracy of Kriging-based model excels the original model.