Research on water inrush and mud inrush from water-rich fault fracture zone of deep tunnel in mountainous area

Abstract

Taking the potential risk of water and mud inrush in the construction of a water conveyance tunnel of a hydropower station as the engineering background, based on the field investigation and data collection, the whole process of tunnel construction is simulated and analyzed by using 3D finite element Midas. The results show that because the tunnel passes through the strong water rich fault fracture zone, the filling material in the fault fracture zone has obvious stress concentration under the coupling action of high stress, high pressure seepage and construction disturbance, and the displacement of the filling material has increased significantly. After the fault fracture zone is exposed, the seepage speed has increased significantly, indicating that water and mud inrush disaster has occurred here. It is suggested that when the tunnel passes through complex water-rich fault, monitoring and early warning and excavation support measures should be strengthened to prevent water and mud inrush accidents. The research results have a certain guiding role for the safe construction of the tunnel project.

Experimental Investigation of Water-Rich Fully Weathered Granite on Water Bursting and Mud Bursting

“…So far, the research studies about the mechanism of water bursting and mud bursting have been focused on the water bursting owing to the high-pressure fracture in rock masses Meng et al, 2020), karst water bursting Huang et al, 2019;Zhu and Li, 2020), and activated water bursting in fault zones (Guo et al, 2020;Peng et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2020). However, very few research studies in the past years paid their attention on the mechanism of water bursting and mud bursting , especially the variable mass characteristics about the evolution of water bursting and mud bursting in fully weathered granite were not involved.…”