Calculation of Building Foundation Settlement Caused by Shield Tunnel Construction

• Main Authors: Chun-lai Chen, Hao-qiang Yu, Gang Wei, Xiao Wang, Qi Ye
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology 2015-04-01
• Series: Journal of Engineering Science and Technology Review
• Subjects: shield tunnel; building; foundation settlement; ground loss
• Online Access: http://www.jestr.org/downloads/Volume8Issue3/fulltext83242015.pdf

The formation of settlement troughs for the case when there are buildings above a tunnel is different from the case without buildings present on the ground surface during construction of shield tunnels below the ground. By considering the influence of building stiffness, previous studies have calculated the surface of building subsidence during shield construction, but it was assumed that the soil around the tunnel would shrink evenly toward the center and that the focus should be fixed and the foundation stiffness of the building was not considered. The method used in this paper modifies the forward method, by considering a uniform ground movement model for shield tunnels and the foundation stiffness and depth. The calculated values are compared to the measured values, the values of the other method and also values obtained using finite-element simulation. The effects of the equivalent elastic modulus of buildings E1, the depth of the tunnel axis from the ground h and the distance between the tunnel axis L to the settlement of foundations are also analyzed. The results show that the values obtained by the present calculation method are more similar to the measured and finite-element simulation values than the values obtained using the other method. The settlement of foundations is found to decrease with increasing E1, h and L.