Abstract

Ground reaction curve is very useful information for estimating the installation time of the tunnel support. The ground reaction curve can be estimated by analytical closed form solutions derived in case of circular section and isotropic stress condition. The nature of the ground reaction, however, depends significantly on tunnel configurations. Nevertheless, few purely analytical and experimental studies of this problem due to tunnel configurations appear to have been carried out. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the influence of tunnel configurations in order to use simply in practical design. This paper describes a numerical study for the intial elastic displacement in the ground reaction curve due to configuration of tunnel excavation. In order to evaluate the applicability of analytical closed form solution in practical design, the parametric studies were carried out by numerical analysis in elastic tunnel behaviour. In the studies, S value, namely configuration factor, defined as the ratio between tunnel height (b) and width (a), varies between 0.5 and 3.0, initial ground vertical stress varies between 5∼30 MPa for each S values. The results indicated that the self-supportability of ground is larger in the ground having low S value. It, however, is suggested that the applicability of closed form solution may not be adequate to determine directly the installation time of the support and self-supportability of ground. It should be necessary to perform the additional numerical analysis.