Characteristics of the crack tip field in high-speed railway tunnel linings under train-induced aerodynamic shockwaves

Abstract

High-speed railway tunnels in various countries have continuously reported accidents of vault falling concrete blocks. Once the concrete block falling occurs, serious consequences follow, and traffic safety may be endangered. The aerodynamic shockwave evolves from the initial compression wave may be an important inducement causing the tunnel lining cracks to grow and form falling concrete blocks. A joint calculation framework is established based on ANSYS Fluent, ABAQUS, and FRANC3D for calculating the crack tip field under the aerodynamic shockwave. The intensification effect of aerodynamic shockwaves in the crack is revealed, and the evolution characteristics of the crack tip field and the influence factors of stress intensity factor (SIF) are analyzed. Results show that (1) the aerodynamic shockwave intensifies after entering the crack, resulting in more significant pressure in the crack than the input pressure. The maximum pressure of the inclined and longitudinal cracks is higher than the corresponding values of the circumferential crack, respectively. (2) The maximum SIF of the circumferential, inclined, and longitudinal crack appears at 0.5, 0.68, and 0.78 times the crack front length. The maximum SIF of the circumferential crack is higher than that of the inclined and longitudinal crack. The possibility of crack growth of the circumferential crack is the highest under aerodynamic shockwaves. (3) The influence of train speed on the SIF of the circumferential crack is more than 40%. When the train speed, crack depth, and crack length change, the change of pressure in the crack is the direct cause of the change of SIF.

Keywords

Falling concrete blocks / Tunnel lining cracks / Aerodynamic shockwave / Intensification effect / Crack tip field / Stress intensity factor

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yi-Kang Liu: Investigation, Software, Validation, Writing - original draft. Yu-Ling Wang: Validation, Writing - review & editing. E Deng: Data curation, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Writing - review & editing. Yi-Qing Ni: Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing. Wei-Chao Yang: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Writing - review & editing. Wai-Kei Ao: Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51978670 and 52308419), the Science and Technology Research and Development Program of China railway group limited (Grant Nos. 2021-Major-01 and 2022-Key-22), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Central South University (Grant No. 2023ZZTS0369), the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation Project (Grant No. 2021B1515130006), the Innovation and Technology Commission of Hong Kong, China (Grant No. K-BBY1), and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Postdoc Matching Fund Scheme (Grant No. 1-W21Q).

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