• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.12 no.12
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• pp.13-20
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• 2011

The main objective of this paper is finding the influence factors and their degree of importance to steel liner's safety by investigating and evaluating the buckling incidents of steel tunnel liner under external water pressure. The study was based on the detailed investigation to the design conditions and incident shapes at 2m diameter waterway tunnel with a partially buckled internal steel liner and concrete backfilled lining as the raw water transmission pipe line of regional water supply project. Appropriate buckling theory capable of applying this incident points was selected by referring the existing literature and compared with the results of investigation. Also, hydrogeological characteristics of this site on buckling pressure was evaluated. The result of this study was shown that both the hydrogeological characteristics of upper geologic layers and proper tunnel construction are important factors on buckling at steel liner, and hydraulic gradient level should be decided according to the hydrogeological characteristics. This incident case analysis on steel liner of pressurized waterway tunnel was expected to provide more information for realizing the problems and improvements at each design, construction and maintenance stages.