Coupling Layout Design of Disc Cutters Group and Cutterhead Supporting Structure

Abstract

Cutterhead is one of the key parts of full face tunneling boring machine(TBM) and the adaptive design of cutterhead topology structure of the TBM directly affects its boring efficiency and reliability. The key issue of the cutterhead topology design lies in the adaptive layout design of disc cutters group and the cutterhead structure design under the complex rock boundary conditions; they are mutual coupling and mutual influencing. It has been analyzed that the coupling relation between the disc cutters group and the cutterhead structure, and then the nonlinear coupling model between the cutterhead structure and the cutterhead strength and stiffness has been established. Finally the multi-objectives coupling layout design model between the disc cutters group and the cutterhead structure has been constructed and the corresponding multi-subsystem co-evolutionary solving method has been proposed. Taking the practical "Yintao" project as a background, the numerical simulation results have shown that: compared with the original design of cutterhead, the values of maximum stress, maximum deformation, unbalanced moment, unbalanced force, sequential angle and other indicators of the optimal layout design solved by the proposed method have reduced by 30% or more, which has proved the feasibility and efficiency of this method and its capability of providing technical support for engineers.