Behavior of piles in clay during tunneling processes

Abstract

The need to construct tunnels in the big cities becomes a priority these days due to built-up area crowd. These tunnels have large utilities for transportation, sewerage, telecommunication purposes, etc., however they have negative impacts on the surrounding buildings and their piled foundations. Hence, it is necessary to study the effects of tunnel excavation on the adjacent piles and to predict the behavior of these piles subjected to additional stresses and forces from tunneling processes. Many studies have dealt with the behavior of piled foundations due to tunneling. Some of these studies focused on the numerical analyses (e.g. Mroueh and Shahrour, 2003, Surjadinata et al., 2006, Huang et al., 2009, etc.), while others (e.g. Standing and Leung, 2005, Lee andYoo, 2006, Lee and Bassett, 2007, Meguid and Mattar, 2009) used experimental methods. This paper models the tunneling effects on adjacent pile group using three-dimensional finite element analysis. The tunnel, piles and pile cap were modeled using PLAXIS 3D TUNNEL software version 2. Soft Soil Creep (SSC) model is used as the constitutive model of the soil which describes the behavior of normally consolidated clay.