Performance and Seismic Design of Underground Structures

Underground structures, tunnels, subways, metro stations and parking lots, are crucial components of the build environment and transportation networks. Considering their importance for life save and economy, appropriate seismic design is of prior significance. Their seismic performance during past earthquakes is generally better than aboveground structures. However several cases of severe damage to total collapse have been reported in the literature, with that of the Daikai metro station in Kobe during the Hyogoken-Nambu earthquake (1995) being one of the most characteristic. These recent damages revealed some important weaknesses in the current seismic design practices. The aim of this chapter is not to make another general presentation of the methods used for the seismic design of underground structures, but rather to discuss and highlight the most important needs for an improved seismic performance and design. In that respect it is important to consider that the specific geometric and conceptual features of underground structures make their seismic behavior and performance very distinct from the behavior of aboveground structures, as they are subjected to strong seismic ground deformations and distortions, rather than inertial loads. Several methods are available, from simplified analytical elastic solutions, to sophisticated and in principal more accurate, full dynamic numerical models. Most of them have noticeable weaknesses on the description of the physical phenomenon, the design assumptions and principles and the evaluation of the parameters they need. The chapter presents a short but comprehensive review of the available design methods, denoting the crucial issues and the problems that an engineer could face during the seismic analysis. The main issues discussed herein cover the following topics: (i) force based design against displacement based design, (ii) deformation modes of rectangular underground structures under seismic excitation, (iii) seismic earth pressures on underground structures, (iv) seismic shear stresses distribution on the perimeter of the structure, (v) appropriateness of the presently used impedance functions to model the inertial and the kinematic soil-structure interaction effects, (vi) design seismic input motion, accounting of the incoherence effects and the spatial variation of the motion and (vii) effect of the build environment (i.e. city-effects) on the seismic response of underground structures. The discussion is based on detailed numerical analysis of specific cases and recent experimental results in centrifuge tests. Other important issues like the design of submerged tunnels to liquefaction risk, or the complexity to evaluate the response of the joints of submerged tunnels are also shortly addressed. Finally we present the most recent developments on the evaluation of adequate fragility curves for shallow tunnels.