Three dimensional simulation of slurry shield tunnelling

The movements and settlements of the soil associated with slurry shield tunnelling depend on many parameters of the control of the tunnel boring machine: slurry pressure on the face, over cut of the machine itself, injection of the grout in the annular void behind the TBM. The two dimensional simulations by considering the concept of stress release or volume loss for every step of the construction enable to calculate approximately the measured movements considering the contribution of every parameter step by step with a corrective coefficient due to 2D simplification. But this corrective coefficient can be only determined by back analysis based on the experimental measurements. We propose a three dimensional…