Impact of ground motion characteristics on the seismic fragility of circular tunnels

Abstract

The seismic performance of tunnel structure can be examined by fragility analysis, which determines the probability that demand will exceed capacity for a given hazard intensity. Although it is commonly understood that earthquake uncertainties dominate fragility features, the implication of ground motion characteristics on the shield tunnel fragility analysis has not been comprehensively explored. Thus, this study aims to compare the effects of various earthquake characteristics on the fragility of the investigated shield tunnels. To this end, a typical shield tunnel was chosen and modelled using the finite element software. In addition, to account for typical ground motion characteristics, various ground motion sets, including near-field no plus motions (NFNP), near-field motions with a pulse (NFP), and far-field motions (FF), are selected, and a fragility analysis was assessed for every set of ground motion. The fragility curves were generated employing peak ground acceleration (PGA) as the intensity measure (IM) and tunnel drift as the damage measure (DM). The findings indicate that shield tunnels subjected to NFP may be more vulnerable compared to those subjected to NFNP and FF ground motions. This study’s findings highlight the vital role of ground motion characteristics in evaluating the fragility of shield tunnels. Moreover, the results may inform future seismic risk and resiliency evaluations regarding the importance of considering or disregarding the impacts of ground motion characteristics on tunnel vulnerability.

Keywords

Ground motion characteristics / Shield tunnel / Seismic vulnerability / Resilience assessment

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zhong-Kai Huang: Writing - review & editing, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Conceptualization, Methodology. Dong-Mei Zhang: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Wu-Yu Zhang: Methodology, Resources, Conceptualization. Yong-Bo Li: Project administration, Resources, 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

The authors appreciate the support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2022YFC3800905 and 2021YFF0502200), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52478410, 52090082, and 52238010), Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (2023QNRC001), and Fundamental Research Program of the Qinghai Science and Technology Department (2023-ZJ-926M).

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