Interaction of Twin Circular Shallow Tunnels in Soils—Parametric Study

Abstract

In big and crowded cities with limited urban areas, it is sometimes necessary to build twin tunnels to overcome transportation problems. In a city like Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, tunneling becomes very essential to solve effectively traffic conjunctions and associated problems. The city started to construct big tunneling projects and it is expected in the near future to start building twin tunnels. If the design and construction process of twin tunnels are not understood and considered, damage to the tunnel lining or excessive ground surface settlement may take place. In this study, the interaction between adjacent tunnels excavated through soils in Saudi Arabia has been investigated using FE analysis and the range of the encountered soil properties. The investigation considered the effect of spacing between the twin tunnels and ground conditions on tunnel behavior. The analysis focused on the effect of constructing twin tunnels on ground surface settlement, contact pressure between lining and ground, and change in tunnel diameter. Based on the results obtained, it was observed that as the compressibility ratio, c, and spacing between tunnels decreased, the interaction effect between tunnels increased. For compressibility ratio of 0.01, the excavation of the new tunnel caused an increase in the lining deformation of the old one in the range of 0.1% to 0.3%. Furthermore, the excavation of the new tunnel leads to an increase in the contact pressure at the crown of the old one by 7% - 9%. At the spring line level, the excavation of the new tunnel had almost no effect on the far side of the old one. On the other hand, and for low compressibility ratio, the new tunnel excavation significantly affected contact pressure at the near side of the old one. For an expected tunnel life of 100 years, the results show an increase in the normalized contact pressure at the crown of the old tunnel due to the excavation of the new one in the range of 2% - 7% for compressibility ratio ranging between 0.01 - 0.1, respectively.