One of the main products of the mining industry is crushed stone, which is an essential material in structure construction, such as concrete aggregate, asphalt aggregate in road construction, ballast aggregate in railway construction, etc. Due to the application fields, evaluating the durability of these aggregates is required. An economical and durable design cannot be achieved without knowing the resisting capacity of the used stone materials to abrasion, crushing, impact, and disintegration – collectively known as mechanical weathering or degradation. In addition to presenting different forms of mechanical weathering of aggregates, the paper summarizes the most frequently used laboratory tests developed to determine the resistance to these stresses. It introduces various national standards emphasizing their differences and examines the possibility of test result comparability with respect to geology and practical application. The research also presents several empirical relations from the literature between the different degradation parameters. Besides that, the paper aims to give an overview of the international literature that deals with the mechanical weathering of aggregate materials by using organizing tables and comparative graphs; it tries to contribute to the organization and comparability of the existing knowledge and the results found in the literature.

The aggregates are essential materials in civil engineering, they are used for railway and road constructions, for hydraulic engineering but they are also the base material of concrete. The crushed stones are exposed to several effects during their lifespan. Therefore, several tests were developed to evaluate their performance. One of the most important aspects is the resistance to degradation. However, degradation tests require special types of equipment and usually take longer than common strength tests which are more likely to be available for rock materials. Therefore, the empirical connections between strength and degradation values can be extremely useful in practice. The paper aimed to collect all available relationships and datasets from the literature that presents the relations between these different parameters – such as Aggregate Impact Value (AIV), Aggregate Crushing Value (ACV), Ten Percent Fines Value (TFV), Los Angeles Abrasion Value (LAAV), and micro-Deval Coefficient (MDE) – and rock strength parameters – such as Uniaxial Compressive Strength (UCS) and Point Load Strength Index (IS(50)) – and to provide the best-fit formula for different rock types. The paper also highlights the difficulties and limitations of the compared relationships.

The study analyses the excavation of a repository chamber in a radioactive waste storage facility in Hungary, using three-dimensional numerical modelling to assess tunnel deformations. The project's comprehensive field mapping and monitoring system made it possible to compare the results of numerical calculations based on field and laboratory measurements with the real behaviour of the tunnel. During excavation, tunnel displacements were continuously recorded using extensometers and two types of convergence measurements, which allowed a comparison of the deformations of the real and modelled environment. The displacements between the measuring points defined in the model during the convergence measurement were investigated. A mechanically realistic but simple 3D model was developed, based on extensive field and laboratory data, which reproduced tunnel displacements of the same order of magnitude as observed in monitoring measurements.