Abstract

This study was performed to investigate the bending stresses of tunnel shotcrete as a function of the coefficient of lateral earth pressure. To perform this study, a large scale model tunnel with an one-lane horseshoe shaped road tunnel was prepared. The 3 dimensional numerical analyses were carried out to verify the results obtained from the model tests. For the loading system during the tests, 11 cylinder pressure jacks which can be controlled individually were used to simulate various loading conditions. The tests were preformed three times with three different lateral earth pressure coefficients of 0.5, 1.0 and 2.0. The bending stresses of shotcrete measured in tests were compared and analyzed with those calculated from numerical analyses. As a result, it was found that the bending compressive stresses obtained from numerical analyses were similar to those of tunnel model tests and bending tensile stresses were slightly overestimated during numerical analyses.