Face Failure Potential of a Circular Tunnel Driven in Anisotropic and Nonhomogeneous Soils
Publication: International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 20, Issue 8
Abstract
A new procedure is presented in this paper to assess the tunnel face stability in anisotropic and nonhomogeneous soils. The three-dimensional (3D) rotational failure mechanism proposed by Subrin and Wong ( 2002) is used to include the anisotropic and nonhomogeneous soil parameters into the computational model. Regarding previous findings, the cohesion of soils is modeled as varying with direction to account for the anisotropy and linearly increasing with depth for the nonhomogeneity. A more complex case with two-layer soils is considered where sudden changes of cohesion, nonhomogeneous coefficient, and unit weight at the interface are assumed. A degraded program and a numerical simulation with FLAC3D are performed to validate the proposed methodology. The critical support pressures are calculated using the proposed approach to show the influences of the involved parameters on tunnel face stability. Sixteen combinations of different parameters are specially chosen to investigate their influences on the shape of the failure block. According to the numerical results, the 3D profiles of failure mechanisms are plotted to give a visual description of face failure.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or codes that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The preparation of the paper has received financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation (51378510). The financial supports is greatly appreciated.
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Published In
International Journal of Geomechanics
Volume 20 • Issue 8 • August 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 3, 2019
Accepted: Feb 7, 2020
Published online: May 21, 2020
Published in print: Aug 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Oct 21, 2020
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