Aplicação da teoria do caos no estudo da queda de blocos rochosos no Morro do Cantagalo, Rio de Janeiro RJ

Abstract

Rock slopes present high potential for rock falls instabilizations. This type of mass movement generally occurs abruptly and without signs of previous movement, involving kinetic energies and high speeds, resulting in catastrophic events. Despite the existing research about the problem, a high level of understanding about the interactions between the conditioning factors and the susceptibility of these events is still necessary. The chaos theory analyzes phenomena that, in addition to being sensitive to the initial conditions, present the overall behavior of the system that is notoriously different from those observed in Linear Systems, in which it is possible to divide the problem into parts and investigate them in isolation. This dependence arises from the nonlinearities existing in the system, which amplify small variations in the initial conditions, making the evolution of the phenomenon unpredictable. The present research aims at analyzing the applicability of chaos theory to describe the behavior of this mass movement through simulations of trajectories using the RocFall 6.0 program. Initially, a preliminary study of four distinct cases was carried out to verify the possibility of using the chaos theory to describe the behavior of the rock falls on slopes of augen gneiss and with this, to enable the application of the same into the case of study, elaborated from a section of the scarp of Morro do Cantagalo, facing Rua Professor Gastão Bahiana, Copacabana neighborhood, in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The results obtained during the research suggest that the mass movements of the rock falls type can be described by the chaos theory in view of the functional universality found, and the chaotic behavior is associated mainly with the concavity and / or with the convexity presented by the surfaces of the slopes, being able to present a weak or strongly chaotic behavior.