Prediction of tunnelling induced ground movement in clay using principle of minimum total potential energy

Abstract

The accurate prediction of tunnelling induced ground movement is of practical and theoretical significance. This paper proposes a mixed empirical-analytical method based on the principle of minimum total potential energy to predict the ground movement due to tunnelling in undrained clay. The proposed method considers the plastic behaviour of the soil. Based on the theory of curvilinear Euler beam, the proposed method considers the soil-lining interaction, which is simplified as a constant force in classical MSD methods. Moreover, the proposed method can deal with the deformation mechanism with multiple undetermined parameters. The tunnelling-induced ground movement can be found by minimizing the total potential energy of the concerned system composed of soil and lining. Four well-documented tunnelling projects are adopted to evaluate the applicability of the proposed method. The results reveal that our method provides better predictions of both surface and subsurface settlements above the tunnel than the other two semi-analytical methods. Moreover, our method excels the other two methods in predicting the tunnelling projects with large gap parameter values as it considers the plastic behaviour of the soil.