Experimental study on mechanical behavior and countermeasures of mountain tunnels under strike-slip fault movement

Abstract

In the seismic mountainous regions such as western China, it is usuallly inevitable to construct tunnels near active fault zones. Those fault-crossing tunnel structures can be extremely vulnerable during earthquakes. Extensive experimental studies have been conducted on the response of continuous mountain tunnels under reverse and normal fault movements, limited experimental investigations are available in the literatures on mountain tunnels with special structural measures crossing strike-slip faults. In this study, a new experimental facility for simulating the movement of strike-slip fault was developed, accounting for the spatial deformation characteristics of large active fault zones. Two groups of sandbox experiment were performed on the scaled tunnel models to investigate the evolution of ground deformation and surface rupture subjected to strike-slip fault motion and its impact on a water conveyance tunnel. The nonlinear response and damage mechanism of continuous tunnels and tunnels incorporated with specially designed articulated system were examined. The test results show that most of slip between stationary block and moving block occurred within the fault core, and significant surface ruptures are observed along the fault strike direction at the fault damage zone. The continuous tunnel undergoes significant shrinkage deformation and diagonal-shear failure near the slip surface and resulted in localized collapse of tunnel lining. The segments of articulated system tunnel suffer a significant horizontal deflection of about 5°, which results in opening and misalignment at the flexible joint. The width of the damaged zone of the articulated system tunnel is about 0.44 to 0.57 times that of the continuous tunnel. Compared to continuous tunnels, the articulated design significantly reduces the axial strain response of the tunnel lining, but increases the circumferential tensile strain at the tunnel crown and invert. It is concluded that articulated design provides an effective measure to reduce the extent of damage in mountain tunnel.

Keywords

Tunnel engineering / Strike-slip fault / Model test / Articulated design / Damage mechanism

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zhen Wang: Writing - original draft, Validation, Methodology, Data curation. Zilan Zhong: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Investigation. Mi Zhao: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Xiuli Du: Visualization, Conceptualization. Jingqi Huang: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Methodology. Hongru Wang: Software, Data curation.

Declaration of competing interest

Mi Zhao is an early career editorial board member for Underground Space and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article. All authors declare that there are no competing interests.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFC3004300) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52220105011) for their financial support of the present research. Also, the authors would like to thank the Key Laboratory of Urban Security and Disaster Engineering of Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Technology for providing the facilities.

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