Damage-free coring technique for rock mass under high in-situ stresses

Rock sampling with traditional coring method would cause initial damage to rock samples induced by in-situ stress relief during coring.To solve this problem,a damage-free coring method is proposed in this paper.The proposed coring scheme is numerically modeled first,and then it is verified by comparative laboratory tests using rock samples both obtained by conventional coring method and the proposed damage-free coring method.The result indicates that the in-situ stresses in sampling area could be reduced by 30%-50% through drilling a certain number of destressing holes around the whole sampling area.The spacing between adjacent destressing holes is about 10 cm.The average uniaxial compressive strength（UCS） of rock samples obtained by the damage-free coring method in Jinping II hydropower station with overburden depth of 1 900 m is higher than that of samples obtained by the conventional coring method with the same depth by 5%-15% and an average of 8%.In addition,the effectiveness of damage-free coring method can also be verified by acoustic emission（AE） monitoring.The AE events monitored during uniaxial compression test of damage-free coring samples is fewer than that of conventional coring samples at the primarily loading phase.