failure mechanisms for the face stability analysis of tunnels driven by a pressurized shield. International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics, Wiley, 2011Wiley, , 35 (12), pp.1363Wiley, -1388Wiley, . 10.1002 Rotational failure mechanisms for the face stability analysis of tunnels driven by a pressurized shield Nantes, Bd. de l'université, BP 152, cedex, France The aim of this paper is to determine the collapse and blow-out face pressures of a circular tunnel driven by a pressurized shield. The analysis is performed in the framework of the kinematical approach of the limit analysis theory. Two rotational failure mechanisms are proposed for the active and passive cases. These mechanisms have two significant advantages with respect to the available ones: (i) they take into account the entire circular tunnel face instead of an inscribed ellipse to this circular area, and (ii) they are more consistent with the rotational rigid-block movement observed in the experimental tests. For both the active and passive cases, the three-dimensional failure surface was generated 'point by point' instead of simple use of the existing standard geometric shapes such as cones or cylinders. This was achieved by employing a spatial discretization technique. The numerical results have shown that the present rotational mechanisms provide, in the case of frictional soils (with or without cohesion), a significant improvement with respect to the translational mechanisms. Finally, an extension of the proposed collapse mechanism to include a tension cut-off in the classical Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion is presented and discussed.

This paper presents a reliability-based approach for the three-dimensional analysis and design of the face stability of a shallow circular tunnel driven by a pressurized shield. Both the collapse and the blow-out failure modes of the ultimate limit state are studied. The deterministic models are based on the upper-bound method of the limit analysis theory. The collapse failure mode was found to give the most critical deterministic results against face stability and was adopted for the probabilistic analysis and design. The random variables used are the soil shear strength parameters. The Hasofer-Lind reliability index and the failure probability were determined. A sensitivity analysis was also performed. It was shown that ͑1͒ the assumption of negative correlation between the soil shear strength parameters gives a greater reliability of the tunnel face stability with respect to the one of uncorrelated variables; ͑2͒ FORM approximation gives accurate results of the failure probability; and ͑3͒ the failure probability is much more influenced by the coefficient of variation of the angle of internal friction than that of the cohesion. Finally, a reliability-based design is performed to determine the required tunnel pressure for a target collapse failure probability.

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