The Influence of Front Support on Vibration Behaviors of TBM Cutterhead under Impact Heavy Loads

Cutterhead is one of the key parts of Tunnel Boring Machine, TBM. The performance of cutterhead has a great impact on the boring capability of TBM. The impact heavy torque and thrust force bore by cutterhead during the tunneling process will cause severe vibration and lead to decline in its life even broken, which affect the boring efficiency. In this paper, a TBM mainframe model of Northwest Liaoning project has been built based on the multi-body system dynamics simulation platform ADAMS. It also has been discussed in the paper that the influence of front support on the vibration characteristics of cutterhead. The simulation results show that the front support will improve the vibration behaviors of cutterhead: The stabilization time of rotational and translational motion decreases 90% and 10% at least, the axial amplitude decreases 8%. All these conclusions have demonstrated that front support should be adopted when designing the TBM.