Stability of long circular tunnels in sloping ground

ABSTRACT

Assessment of tunnel stability has become increasingly crucial as more and more tunnels are built in difficult terrains such as sloping ground. The required support pressure on the tunnel walls associates both tunnel stability and liner design considerations. The present analysis attempts to find a uniform internal pressure which can support a circular tunnel built in a sloping ground with a particular level of stability in cohesive-frictional soils. The lower bound finite element limit analysis has been applied to find the required minimum uniform internal support pressure presented as a non-dimensional term p/c; where p is the minimum normal internal pressure on the tunnel boundary to avoid collapse and c is the cohesion of soil. The variation of p/c is presented for a range of normalised embedment depth of tunnel (H/D), stability number (γD/c), internal friction angle of soil (ϕ) and slope angle (β); where H is the crown depth of the tunnel, D is the tunnel diameter and γ is the unit weight of soil. Appropriate comparisons have been carried out with available literature. Failure patterns of the tunnel have also been studied to understand the extent and the type of failure zone which may generate during the collapse.

KEYWORDS:

• Slope
• tunnels
• support pressure
• failure
• limit analysis
• finite element

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.