Fluid-solid coupling numerical simulation of micro-disturbance grouting treatment for excessive deformation of shield tunnel

Abstract

Micro-disturbance grouting is a recovery technique to reduce the excessive deformation of operational shield tunnels in urban areas. The grout mass behaves as a fluid in the ground before hardening to form a grout-soil mixture, which highlights the necessity of using fluid-solid coupling method in the simulation of grouting process. Within a discrete element modeling environment, this paper proposes a novel fluid-solid coupling method based on the pore density flow calculation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, it is applied to numerical simulation of micro-disturbance grouting process for treatment of large transverse deformation of a shield tunnel in Shanghai Metro, China. The simulation results reveal the mechanism of recovering tunnel convergence by micro-disturbance grouting in terms of compaction and fracture of soil, energy analysis during grouting, and mechanical response of soil-tunnel interaction system. Furthermore, the influence of the three main grouting parameters (i.e., grouting pressure, grouting distance, and grouting height) on tunnel deformation recovery efficiency is evaluated through parametric analysis. In order to efficiently recover large transverse deformation of shield tunnel in Shanghai Metro, it is suggested that the grouting pressure should be about 0.55 MPa, the grouting height should be in the range of 6.2-7.0 m, and the grouting distance should be in the range of 3.0-3.6 m. The results provide a valuable reference for grouting treatment projects of over-deformed shield tunnel in soft soil areas.

Keywords

Fluid-solid coupling / Discrete element method / Pore density flow / Micro-disturbance grouting / Soil-tunnel interaction

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yanjie Zhang: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing - original draft. Zheng Cao: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Software. Chun Liu: Funding acquisition, Software, Visualization, Writing - review & editing. Hongwei Huang: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Validation.

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

The research work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Henan, China (Grant No. 242300421646) and the Key Laboratory of Geotechnical and Underground Engineering of Ministry of Education, Tongji University, China (Grant No. KLE-TJGE-B2205). The support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also expressed to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the manuscript.

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