Laboratory test on three-dimensional stress state of the surrounding soil during tunnel excavation

Abstract

During tunnel excavation, the surrounding soil experiences complex stress redistribution, which is the root cause of the ground deformation and other engineering disasters. Many researchers have studied this issue through numerical simulations, but the results depend on the soil constitutive model and simulation strategy for the excavation process. In this paper, a large-scale laboratory test is conducted using a scaled shield machine, and the three-dimensional stress state of the surrounding soil is measured by a special earth pressure cell. Test data shows that the normal stress components and principal stresses above the crown decrease, and the stress path on the normalized deviatoric plane reaches the failure envelope determined by Matsuoka-Nakai criterion. Due to the misalignment between the stress release direction and principal directions of the geostatic stresses, shear stress is generated in the physical space, which explains the principal stress rotation of the surrounding soil near the shoulder. Near the sidewall, the major principal stress σ₁ is vertical and remains basically unchanged, the intermediate principal stress σ₂ is along the longitudinal direction and increases when the cutterhead reaches the monitoring section, while the minor principal stress σ₃ is along the transversal direction and decreases. On the deviatoric plane, stress paths near the foot and invert have similar development tendencies as those near the shoulder and crown, respectively. Therefore, the influence of the complex stress state on soil behaviours should be considered to provide a reasonable analysis for the tunnel excavation problem.

Keywords

Tunneling / Three-dimensional stress state / Surrounding soil / Laboratory test / Principal stress rotation

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yu Tian: Methodology, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Hao Chen: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Formal analysis, Methodology. Junquan Wen: Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Methodology. Abdul Motalleb Qaytmas: Methodology, Writing - original draft, Data curation. Dechun Lu: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition, Supervision. Xiuli Du: Supervision, Funding acquisition, 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 supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2022YFC3800901) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51908010).

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