Research on the effect of underground tunnelling on the settlement of the building and the ground surfaces

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The construction of underground tunnel plays a more and more important role on the development of big cities. One of the most important problems caused by the construction of tunnel is that underground excavation will cause large settlements of ground buildings. And it heavily affects the safety of the building. The depth of underground tunnel and the horizontal distance between the tunnel and the building are two important factors which have great influence on the settlements of ground buildings. During the designing of tunnels these two factors must be taken into account. It is necessary to find out the regulations between the settlements of buildings and those two factors. On the other hand, the loess plateau in the west of China has a vast territory, integrated strata and large depth, which is rare in the world. Currently in big cities located in the loess areas, such as Xi'an, underground tunnel is preferred to be adopted to solve the traffic problem. So it is of great importance for the construction of underground project to research the relationship between the building subsidence and the excavation of underground cavity or the construction of underground tunnel in western China. This paper will aim to find out the quantity rules that how the underground tunnels affect the settlements of ground buildings in the loess areas. According to the mechanical characteristic of loess, the Duncan-Chang non-linear elastic constitutive model will be adopted; through the simulation in term of the FEA program- GeoFBA, the regulation that how the depth of underground tunnel and the horizontal distance between the tunnel and the buildings influence the settlements of ground buildings, will be obtained. And this result can be used as theoretic reference to the construction of the underground engineering in loess areas. (A) This paper was presented at Safety in the underground space - Proceedings of the ITA-AITES 2006 World Tunnel Congress and the 32nd ITA General Assembly, Seoul, Korea, 22-27 April 2006. For the covering abstract see ITRD E129148. Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.