Deterministic and Probabilistic Assessment of Tunnel Face Stability

• Main Author: Pan, Qiujing
• Other Authors: Grenoble Alpes
• Language: en
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Stabilité; Simulation numérique; Analyse limite; Approche probabiliste; Champs aléatoires; Stability; Numerical simulation; Limit analysis; Probabilistic approach; Random field
• Online Access: http://www.theses.fr/2017GREAI044

The main work for Qiujing PAN’s PhD thesis is to develop the stability analysis for underground structures, which contains two parts, deterministic model and probabilistic analysis. During his 1st year of PhD research, he has mainly finished the deterministic model study. In the 2nd year, I developed a probabilistic model for high dimensional problems. === In the contemporary society, the utilization and exploitation of underground space has become an inevitable and necessary measure to solve the current urban congestion. One of the most important requirements for successful design and construction in tunnels and underground engineering is to maintain the stability of the surrounding soils of the engineering. But the stability analysis requires engineers to have a clear ideal of the earth pressure, the pore water pressure, the seismic effects and the soil variability. Therefore, the research aimed at employing an available theory to design tunnels and underground structures which would be a hot issue with high engineering significance. Among these approaches employed to address the above problem, limit analysis is a powerful tool to perform the stability analysis and has been widely used for real geotechnical works. This research subject will undertake further research on the application of upper bound theorem to the stability analysis of tunnels and underground engineering. Then this approach will be compared with three dimensional analysis and experimental available data. The final goal is to validate new simplified mechanisms using limit analysis to design the collapse and blow-out pressure at the tunnel face. These deterministic models will then be used in a probabilistic framework. The Collocation-based Stochastic Response Surface Methodology will be used, and generalized in order to make possible at a limited computational cost a complete parametric study on the probabilistic properties of the input variables. The uncertainty propagation through the models of stability and ground movements will be evaluated, and some methods of reliability-based design will be proposed. The spatial variability of the soil will be taken into account using the random field theory, and applied to the tunnel face collapse. This model will be developed in order to take into account this variability for much smaller computation times than numerical models, will be validated numerically and submitted to extensive random samplings. The effect of the spatial variability will be evaluated.