Fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC) has a great advantage in earthquake-resistant structures, as compared with regular concrete. However, there are many difficulties in the construction and maintenance of concrete structures due to the high density and easy corrosion of the steel fiber in commonly used steel FRC. With the development of polymer material science, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber has been rapidly promoted for use in FRC because of its low density, high strength, and large elongation at break value. Dynamic uniaxial compression and splitting tensile experiments of FRC with PVA fiber were carried out with two matrix strengths (i.e., C30 and C40), which were blended with PVA fibers with a length of 12 mm in different volume contents (0, 0.2, 0.4, and 0.6%), at the age of 28 days, under different strain rates (i.e., 10⁻⁵, 10⁻⁴, 10⁻³, and 10⁻² s⁻¹). The results show that PVA has an obvious enhancing and toughening effect on concrete, which can improve its brittle properties and residual strength. With increasing strain rate, the compressive strength, split tensile strength, and elastic modulus increase to a certain extent, while the toughness index and the peak strain decrease to a certain degree. The post-peak deformation characteristic changes from a brittle failure of sudden caving to a ductile failure with dense cracking. The effect of PVA is different when enhancing the concrete with two different matrix strengths. The lower the matrix strength, the more obvious the enhancement effect of the fiber, showing characteristics of a higher compressive strength and low split tensile strength in FRC with low strength and a smoother post-peak stress–strain curve.

It is essential to study nuclide transport with underground water in fractured rock masses in order to evaluate potential radionuclide leakage in nuclear waste disposal. A time-domain random-walk (TDRW) method was firstly implemented into a discrete element method (DEM), that is, UDEC, in this paper to address the pressing challenges of modelling the nuclide transport in fractured rock masses such as massive fractures and coupled hydromechanical effect. The implementation was then validated against analytical solutions for nuclide transport in a single fracture and a simple fracture network. After that, the proposed implementation was applied to model the nuclide transport in a complex fracture network investigated in the DECOVALEX 2011 project to analyze the effect of matrix diffusion and stress on the nuclide transport in the fractured rock masses. It was concluded that the implementation of the TDRW method into UDEC provided a valuable tool to study the nuclide transport in the fractured rock masses. Moreover, it was found that the total travel time of the nuclide particles in the fractured rock masses with the matrix diffusion and external stress modelled was much longer than that without the matrix diffusion and external stress modelled.

Uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) is a very important fundamental mechanical parameter for TBM construction. In this work, a predictive model of UCS was proposed according to the TBM parameters including torque, penetration, cutter number, and cutter diameter. The parameter of the new proposed model was established by fourteen existed TBM tunnels’ construction data. To describe the relationships of UCS with PLSI of the Murree tertiary hard rocks, regression analyses have been conducted and a fitting equation with high‐prediction performance was developed. Validation from the data of Neelum–Jhelum (NJ) TBM diversion tunnel were carried out. The absolute errors between predictive UCS and experimental UCS were presented. Through comparison, it can be concluded that the proposed calculation equation of UCS has a high accuracy for a certain rock type with UCS from 50 MPa to 200 MPa. For special hard rock or soft rock, a new calculation equation between UCS and TBM parameters should be studied furthermore.