Evolution of mechanical properties of shield tunnels induced by water-soil gushing

Abstract

Water and soil gushing in shield tunnels pose a significant risk to tunnel structure safety. However, it is challenging to fully capture the evolution of the mechanical response of tunnel structures due to the limitations of conventional numerical methods in simulating large soil deformations around the tunnel due to gushing. This paper developed a coupled material point method (MPM) and finite element method (FEM) approach for water and soil gushing, where MPM was for modelling the soil deformation and FEM was for modelling the tunnel response. The developed approach was utilized to conduct the gushing-induced large deformation analyses and generate the varying soil and water pressures acting on the tunnel lining. Meanwhile, structural internal forces and joint deformations were identified based on the load-structure method. The findings suggest that the gushing process can be categorized into three stages: initial developing, rapid developing, and stable developing stages. The soil and water pressures around the gushing point decreased abruptly during the “rapid developing stage”, but the soil pressures on the tunnel crown and tunnel invert increase, causing a sharp rise in the bending moment of the lining and severe joint deformations, particularly at joints No. 2 and No. 3. Finally, the parametric analyses show that a lower gushing location, deeper tunnel depth, and higher soil shear strength will all exacerbate the influence of water-soil gushing on tunnel structural response, due to variations in the soil and water pressures acting on the tunnel lining throughout the whole process of gushing. These findings underscore the importance of revealing the evolution of tunnel responses to water-soil gushing for maintaining tunnel safety.

Keywords

Water-soil gushing / Shield tunnel / Mechanical response / Joint deformation

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xiao-Chuang Xie: Writing - original draft, Validation, Data curation, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Conceptualization, Software. Dong-Mei Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Conceptualization. Ming-Liang Zhou: Supervision, Software, 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 financially supported by the Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFC3009302), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52238010, 52408436, 52090082, and 52108381), Shanghai Pujiang Programme (23PJD104), Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 2019-01-07-00-07-456 E00051), and Shanghai Science and Technology Committee Program (Grant Nos. 22XD1430200, 21DZ1200601, and 20DZ1201404).

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