Ground-liner interaction in rock tunneling

Abstract Tunnel constructions are gradually increasing because of the development and upgrade of infrastructures such as highway, subway, railway, and many other facilities. Most of tunnels are excavated either by using drilling and blasting or by using tunnel excavation machines such as TBM (tunneling boring machine) or Shield. NATM (new Austrian tunneling method) is one of most frequently used tunneling methods and it uses drilling and blasting to excavate a tunnel in rock. While tunnel excavation using TBM or Shield machines produces quite a regular and smooth tunnel excavation surface, the tunnel excavation using drilling and blasting results in a very irregular and rough excavation surface. The stress behavior in a shotcrete tunnel liner installed along the excavation surface is very dependent on the surface status and tunnel engineer should consider the surface condition for the design of a shotcrete tunnel liner. Numerical analyses are conducted to investigate the effect of the irregularity of tunnel excavation surface on the response of the shotcrete tunnel liner. For the investigations, the controlled parameters include the irregularity of the excavation surface, the stiffness of the surrounding ground, and the coefficient of earth pressure at rest. The investigations show that the response of a shotcrete tunnel liner is highly dependent on the parameters and for the same earth pressure condition the effect is more evident when the irregularity is more severe and the surrounding ground is less stiff.