Reasonable mechanical model on shallow tunnel excavation to eliminate displacement singularity caused by unbalanced resultant

Abstract

When considering initial stress field in geomaterial, nonzero resultant of shallow tunnel excavation exists, which produces logarithmic items in complex potentials, and would further lead to a unique displacement singularity at infinity to violate geo-engineering fact in real world. The mechanical and mathematical reasons of such a unique displacement singularity in the existing mechanical models are elaborated, and a new mechanical model is subsequently proposed to eliminate this singularity by constraining far-field ground surface displacement, and the original unbalanced resultant problem is converted into an equilibrium one with mixed boundary conditions. To solve stress and displacement in the new model, the analytic continuation is applied to transform the mixed boundary conditions into a homogenerous Riemann-Hilbert problem with extra constraints, which is then solved using an approximate and iterative method with good numerical stability. The Lanczos filtering is applied to the stress and displacement solution to reduce the Gibbs phenomena caused by abrupt change of the boundary conditions along ground surface. Several numerical cases are conducted to verify the proposed mechanical model and the results strongly validate that the proposed mechanical model successfully eliminates the displacement singularity caused by unbalanced resultant with good convergence and accuracy to obtain stress and displacement for shallow tunnel excavation. A parametric investigation is subsequently conducted to study the influence of tunnel depth, lateral coefficient, and free surface range on stress and displacement distribution in geomaterial.