TLS and FEM combined methods for deformation analysis of tunnel structures

Abstract

With the increasing of tunnel mileage, one of the most vital problems of broad-scale structures is the intelligent identification and location of structural defects, which require massive data storage capacity and high data processing efficiency. The full-field point cloud data collected by terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can be extracted to construct three-dimensional measured models more accurately, therefore, the fusion of TLS and the finite element method (FEM) is particularly beneficial to the deformation analysis of tunnel structures. This paper combines numerical simulation and full-field measurement to interactively verify the reliability of deformation analysis based on FEM simulation and point cloud processing. The innovation of this paper is that a three-dimensional FEM is validated through the measured point cloud data of the tunnel structure. The result of this study indicated that FEM simulation and the structural health monitoring analysis are consistent.