Tunneling beneath the pile-raft foundations of high-speed railways: Progressive arching deformation and pile settlement behavior

Abstract

Due to the unclear mechanisms behind tunneling-induced deformation of pile-raft foundations, there are strict global restrictions on tunneling beneath embankments of high-speed railways. This study conducted a series of two-dimensional tunneling model tests to investigate the tunneling-induced deformation characteristics and mechanisms of pile-raft foundations. Soil displacement field and pile settlement were measured using particle image velocimetry and displacement transducers. The changes in soil displacement and the flexure of the pile-raft foundation in response to varying tunnel-pile distances, ground surface loads, and tunnel volume loss were analyzed. The results indicate that the tunneling-disturbed zone can be categorized into a loosened zone and an arch zone as identified by the propagation and separation of shear bands, with significant soil settlement occurring in the loosened zone. The maximum settlement of piles in a pile-raft foundation is greater than that in greenfield due to the larger loosened zone. However, the settlement width at the ground surface in pile-raft foundations is reduced due to the blocking effect of the piles. According to the relative position between the piles and the formed arch structure, three patterns of tunneling-ground-pile systems can be identified. As the tunnel-pile distance increases, the maximum settlement of the piles decreases. Increasing surface loads hardly affects the maximum settlement value of the pile, while the tunneling-induced arch zone expands significantly. This study provides a fundamental understanding of pile settlement behavior for tunneling beneath the pile-raft foundations of high-speed railways.

Keywords

Pile-raft foundation / Tunneling / Deformation behavior / Model test / Arching effect

Data availability

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

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Botao Hu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Yao Shan: Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Yu Zhao: Writing - review & editing, Software, Funding acquisition. Binglong Wang: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Shunhua Zhou: Supervision. Giovanni S. Alberti: Validation. Wenjie Ma: Visualization. Bettina Detmann: Investigation. Laurent Briançon: Resources.

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 research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52378458), the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talent of China (Grant No. BX20230233), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 22120230311), Special Funds of the Tongji University for “Sino-German Cooperation 2.0 Strategy”, Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of China (Grant No. 2023A1515110047), the MIUR Excellence Department Project awarded to Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Genova, CUP D33C23001110001, and the European Union - Next Generation EU.

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