Passive instability of longitudinally inclined shallowly-buried shield tunnel using physical model tests and DEM simulations

Abstract

Stability of tunnel face is crucial, but previous studies often overlooked the effect of longitudinal tunnel inclination, leading to inaccurate stability assessments. In this study, nine groups of 1g model tests were conducted to study the influence of longitudinal tunnel inclination on passive limit support pressure and passive failure mode of soil in front of the tunnel face under shallow burial conditions (i.e., cover depth ratio of 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75) in a sand stratum. In addition, discrete element method (DEM) analyses at the same scale were established and calibrated against the model test results. Accordingly, the micromechanical information of soil was derived from a microscopic perspective. The results indicate that upon the passive instability of tunnel face, the soil in front of the tunnel face firstly moved approximately perpendicular to the tunnel face, and then it deflected. The instability area of soil in front of the tunnel face increased with the decrease of longitudinal inclination, when the tunnel cover depth was fixed. Furthermore, microscopic analyses indicate that the longitudinal inclination could significantly affect the soil contact orientation in front of the tunnel face. This was more likely to cause the failure zone to rotate.

Keywords

Tunnel face / Passive failure / Longitudinal inclination / Model test / DEM simulation

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zhiwang Lu: Writing - original draft, Validation, Software, Methodology, Conceptualization. Youlin Ye: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Conceptualization, Funding acquisition. Pengpeng Ni: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization, Funding acquisition. Zijie Qian: Writing - review & editing. Ben Niu: Investigation. Shijian Shang: Writing - review & editing, Software.

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 work described in this paper was supported by the Xiaomi Young Talents Program, the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (Grant Nos. 2023A1515012159, 2025A1515010029, and 2023A1515012334), the “GDAS” Project of Science and Technology Development (2022GDASZH-2022010105), and the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Liaoning Province (Grant No. 2024010136-JH3/101).

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