Protection of Buildings against Damages as a Result of Adjacent Large-Span Tunneling in Shallowly Buried Soft Ground

Abstract

Lot JC3 of the Xianmen Airport Highway Project in China involved building a twin-tube tunnel with each tube serving three-lane one-way traffic. The existence of 79 overlying buildings brought great challenges to the tunnel construction. To safeguard these buildings, two building blocks located above the nearby tunnel portal were approved by the owner of the project to be the trial blocks. Compensation grouting was adopted for ground settlement compensation at this lot. Free-field compensation grouting tests were conducted to derive the suitable grouting parameters. Pretreatment to reinforce the ground prior to the tunneling passage, concurrent grouting to compensate the excessive settlements during the tunneling passage, and regrouting to uplift the distorted buildings after the tunneling passage were designed to protect the trial blocks. According to the monitoring data of the trial blocks and the ground, the characteristics of the soil-structure interaction were studied and the criteria for the safety of the structures were therefore determined.