A study on critical strain based damage-controlled test for the evaluation of rock tunnel stability

In general, the tunnel stability during excavation is assessed by comparing measured displacements at roof and sidewall to control criteria. The control criteria were established based on the past experience that considered ground conditions, size of the tunnel cross section, construction method, supports, etc. Therefore, a number of researches on the control criteria using the critical strain have been conducted. However, the critical strain obtained from uniaxial compression tests have drawbacks of not taking damage in rock mass due to increase of stress level and longitudinal arching into account. In this paper, damage-controlled tests simulating stress level and longitudinal arching during tunnel excavation were carried out in addition to uniaxial compression tests to investigate the critical strain characteristics of granite and gneiss that are most abundant rock types in Korean peninsula. Then, the critical strains obtained from damage-controlled tests were compared to those from uniaxial compression tests; the former showed less values than the latter. These results show that the critical strain obtained from uniaxial compression tests has to be reduced a little bit to take stress history during tunnel excavation into account. Moreover, the damage critical strain was proposed to be used for assessment of the brittle failure that usually occurs in deep tunnels.