FIELD AND LABORATORY MEASUREMENTS OF THE DEPTH VARIATIONS OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES AND WEATHERING DEGREES OF ROCK STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS IN ANICENT BRIDGE

The mechanical behaviour and variations in weathered rock structural components is very important to the stability, durability and protection of ancient rock buildings and bridges. This paper studies the variations of the compressive strength and the elastic modulus with depth in weathered rock blocks. The weathered rock blocks are the rock structural components of the Ancient Moon Bridge. It uses the sound wave in-situ testing technique and the laboratory tests because of the facts that weathered rock sample is hard to get from the ancient bridge the weathered rock samples are easy to break during sampling, and that the laboratory test can only get the mechanical parameters of an entire rock sample and cannot finds the gradual variation of the mechanical parameters along the depth of the weathered rock zone. The results indicate that the compressive strength and the elastic modulus ratio are inverse functions of exponent with respect to the depth from the weathered rock surface to the un-weathered rock zone.