RockPack III FAQ

The programs making up the RockPack III package are based on the text "Rock Slope Engineering" (Hoek and Bray) with enhancements and modified approaches developed over the past 10 years in cooperation with the Corps of Engineers, the US Forest Service, and numerous state DOT's. It's not obvious to the user but RockPack is actually a bundle of 18 programs linked together by a master menu. The analytical approach that we take is to break excavations into distinct domains based on both geologic conditions and excavation geometry. The more complex an excavation, the more individual stereonets we examine in order to identify potential instabilities. The stereonet portion of the programs work great for identifying potential plane, wedge, and toppling failures utilizing Markland's test and variations of Markland's Test. After identifying potential instabilities, RockPack is capable of calculating safety factors for potential plane, wedge, and toppling failures based on approximations of geometry's as in Hoek and Bray.

I believe the latest version will handle 800 but I try to discourage people from going over 100. Using large numbers of discontinuities implies to me that people are trying to include joints from the entire site which tends to blur the more important picture of what is happening within a specific domain. Discontinuity orientations and characteristics can change dramatically from one end of a site to the other end... and only discontinuities those within a particular area will control stability in that area.

The program allows you to enter bolt orientations and bolt tensions when calculating effects of artificial support. Untensioned bolts (dowels) would have to be taken into account by increasing the rock mass cohesion values to compensate for the bolt shear strength. If that's something you want to consider... I can help you estimate the values.

Water pressures can either be calculated from the geometry for worst case conditions, or estimated conditions may be entered, or values from piezometers may be entered directly. Since this is rock, the programs assume secondary porosity along the discontinuities controls by producing uplift and driving forces within the discontinuities. See the diagrams in Hoek and Bray's text.

Yes. Seismic loading is entered in terms of acceleration in g's and assumes the worst case direction for the seismic forces.

RockPack III does not currently support Windows Vista. It does support Windows XP, 2000, and 98.