• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.389-407
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• 2017

In the current work, a series of three-dimensional finite element analysis was carried out to understand the behaviour of pile when the tunnel passes through the lower part of a single pile or group piles. At the current study, the numerical analysis analysed the results regarding the ground reinforcement condition between the tunnel and pile foundation. In the numerical modelling, several key issues, such as the pile settlements, the axial pile forces, the shear stresses and the total displacements near the tunnel have been thoroughly analysed. The pile head settlements of the single pile with the maximum level of reinforcement decreased by about 16% compared to the pile without ground reinforcement. Furthermore, the maximum axial force of the single pile with the maximum level of ground reinforcement experienced a 30% reduction compared to the pile without reinforcement. It has been found that the angle of ground reinforcement in the transverse direction affects the pile behaviour more so than the length of the ground reinforcement in the longitudinal direction. On the other hand, in the case of the pile group with the reinforced pile cap, the ground displacement near the pile tip appears to be similar to the corresponding ground displacement without reinforcement. However, it was found that the pile cap near the pile head greatly restrained the pile head movement and hence the axial pile force increased by about 2.5 times near the pile top compared to the piles in other analysis conditions. The behaviour of the single pile and group piles, depending on the amount of ground reinforcement, has been extensively examined and analysed by considering the key features in great details.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.19 no.1 s.71
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• pp.93-103
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• 2006

It is absolutely essential that safety assessment of the containment buildings during service life because containment buildings are last barrier to protect radioactive substance due to the accidents. Therefore, this study describes an enhanced degenerated shell finite element(FE) which has been developed for nonlinear FE analysis of reinforced concrete(RC) containment buildings with elasto-plastic material model. For the purpose of the material nonlinear analysis, Drucker-Prager failure criteria is adapted in compression region and material parameters which determine the shape of the failure envelop are derived from biaxial stress tests. Reissner-Mindlin(RM) assumptions are adopted to develop the degenerated shell FE so that transverse shear deformation effects is considered. However, it is found that there are serious defects such as locking phenomena in RM degenerated shell FE since the stiffness matrix has been overestimated in some situations. Therefore, shell formulation is provided in this paper with emphasis on the terms related to the stiffness matrix based on assumed strain method. Finally, the performance of the present shell element to analysis RC containment buildings is tested and demonstrated with several numerical examples. From the numerical tests, the present results show a good agreement with experimental data or other numerical results.