• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.1091-1104
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• 2018

Wear prediction of TBM disc cutters is a very important issue during design as well as construction stages for hard rock TBMs as the cutter head intervention is directly related to the time and cost of tunneling. For that, some methods such as NTNU, CSM and Gehring models were used to predict disc cutter wear and intervention interval. There are however some problems to be addressed in these models in terms of accuracy and time for testing, so that a NAT (New Abrasion Tester) model has been developed in order to achieve simplicity and reliability together at the same time (Farrokh and Kim, 2018). On the basis, the proposed NAT model has been applied to ${\bigcirc}{\bigcirc}$ project in Korea. A comparative study was performed to compare with the conventional methods and as a result the NAT model showed a very good agreement with actual cutter life. The NAT model will be further applied to other projects to establish credibility.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.475-488
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• 2017

Wear prediction of TBM disc cutters is a very important issue for hard rock TBMs as number of cutter head intervention. In this regard, some model such as NTNU, Gehring model, CSM models have been used to predict disc cutter wear and intervention interval. There are some deficiencies in these models. This paper developed a new test method for wear prediction for TBM disc cutter and proposed a new abrasion index. In this regard, different abrasivity indices along with their testing methods are explained. A comparative study is performed to develop the predictability of different cutter life evaluation methods and index. The evaluation of the new methods proposed in this paper shows a very good agreement with the actual cutter life and intervention interval length. The proposed tester and index can be easily used to predict the intervention interval length and cutter wear evaluation in both planning and construction stages of a TBM tunneling project.