Rotational failure mechanisms for the face stability analysis of tunnels driven by a pressurized shield

The aim of this paper is to determine the collapse and blow-out face pressures of a circular tunnel driven by a pressurized shield. The analysis is performed in the framework of the kinematical approach of the limit analysis theory. Two rotational failure mechanisms are proposed for the active and passive cases. These mechanisms have two significant advantages with respect to the available ones: (i) they take into account the entire circular tunnel face instead of an inscribed ellipse to this circular area, and (ii) they are more consistent with the rotational rigid-block movement observed in the experimental tests. For both the active and passive cases, the three-dimensional failure surface was generated 'point by point' instead of simple use of the existing standard geometric shapes such as cones or cylinders. This was achieved by employing a spatial discretization technique. The numerical results have shown that the present rotational mechanisms provide, in the case of frictional soils (with or without cohesion), a significant improvement with respect to the translational mechanisms. Finally, an extension of the proposed collapse mechanism to include a tension cut-off in the classical Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion is presented and discussed.