Experimental study on the performance of shield tunnel tail grout in ground

Abstract

Shield tail grouting is an important measure to control tunnelling-induced ground deformation by injecting prepared grouting materials to fill the tail gap. The working performance of grout is usually invisible and hard to obtain in construction. This paper carries out an experimental study to investigate the tail grout behavior in ground. In the current research, a testing device is developed to explore the grout behavior in varying soils. The grout working performance is evaluated not only by the liquid grout properties such as fluidity, consistency, bleeding rate, stone rate and compressed deformation but also solid grout properties such as unconfined compressive strength and permeability. Three typical grouts are chosen and their behaviors in the various soils are observed. To take an insight on the behaviors, scanning electron microscopy and mercury intrusion porosimetry analysis are employed. The microstructure of solid grout is a sign of its working performance. The observation shows that the solid grout micro-structure is influenced by grout proportions, pressure, and ground permeabilities. The experimental results are applied in the case of Beijing Metro Line 12 for validation and as a result, the ground movement is inhibited due to high performance of tail grout.

Keywords

Shield tunnel / Lab test / Tail grout behavior / Deformation / Working performance

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jiaxin Liang: Writing - original draft, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Wei Liu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Xinsheng Yin: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis. Wentao Li: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Investigation, Formal analysis. Zhe Yang: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Data curation. Jichen Yang: Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Validation, Data curation.

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 research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51978430), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China (Grant No. BK20231318), Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China (Grant Nos. LY21E080004 and LQ24F020039), Hangzhou City University, China (Grant No. J-202211), Open fund project of Key Laboratory of Safe Construction and Intelligent Maintenance for Urban Shield Tunnels of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. ZUCC-UST-22-12), and Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Coastal Urban Resilient Infrastructures (Shenzhen University), Ministry of Education (Grant No. CURI-G202304). These supports are gratefully appreciated. Special thanks to Prof. Adam Bezuijen from Ghent University for his warm suggestions for experimental device optimization.

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