Influence of soil conditioning on ground deformation during longitudinal tunneling

Soil conditioning is often adopted to facilitate EPB shield tunneling. However, the resulting improvement of soil fluidity and the reduction of friction forces will also raise the ground deformation problem. This paper aims to investigate the influence of soil conditioning on the ground deformation during longitudinal tunneling. DEM is employed for this study due to its advantages in analyzing large deformations and discontinuous processes. Soil conditioning is modeled by reducing the interparticle friction of soils in a specific zone around the cutterhead of the tunnel. The tunnel advance with different soil-conditioning treatments is thus modeled. Comparisons are carried out on the ground deformation, i.e. ground surface settlement, vertical and horizontal displacements. The influence of soil conditioning on the ground deformation is clarified, and is associated with the fluidity from poor to favorite, and the mechanical properties from dilative to contractive are associated with the increase of soil conditioning. The results are helpful to determine the conditioned soils and control ground deformation for real constructions.