• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.98-106
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• 2008

When a tunnel is excavated in a rock mass of poor condition, the adjacent zone of excavation surface may be reinforced by adopting the appropriate methods such as grouting and rock bolting. The reinforced effect can be evaluated by use of various numerical approaches, where the reinforcing elements may be expressed as distinct discretizations or smeared into the equivalent material properties. In this study, a simple numerical method, which can be classified as the latter approach, was developed for the elasto-plastic analysis of a circular tunnel. If a circular tunnel in a Mohr-Coulomb rock mass is reinforced to a finite thickness, the reinforced annulus may have different material properties from the in-situ rock mass. In the proposed elasto-plastic method for assessing the reinforcing effect, Lee & Pietruszczak (2007)'s method is applied to both the reinforced annulus and the outer insitu rock mass of the fictitious tunnel, and then two results are combined by enforcing the compatibility condition. The method were verified through comparing the results with the proposed method and the commercial finite difference code FLAC. When taking the variation of deformation modulus and strength parameters in the reinforced zone into account, the distributions of stress and radial displacement were much different from those obtained with the assumption of homogeneous rock mass.

• Geotechnical Engineering
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.157-178
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• 1996

Current design methods for reinforced earth structures take no account of the magnitude of the strains induced in the tensile members as these are invariably manufactured from high modulus materials, such as steel, where straits are unlikely to be significant. With fabrics, however, large strains may frequently be induced and it is important to determine these to enable the stability of the structure to be assessed. In the present paper internal design method of analysis relating to the use of fabric reinforcements in reinforced earth structures for both stress and strain considerations is presented. For the internal stability analysis against rupture and pullout of the fabric reinforcements, a strain compatibility analysis procedure that considers the effects of reinforcement stiffness, relative movement between the soil and reinforcements, and compaction-induced stresses as studied by Ehrlich 8l Mitchell is used. I Bowever, the soil-reinforcement interaction is modeled by relating nonlinear elastic soil behavior to nonlinear response of the reinforcement. The soil constitutive model used is a modified vertsion of the hyperbolic soil model and compaction stress model proposed by Duncan et at., and iterative step-loading approach is used to take nonlinear soil behavior into consideration. The effects of seepage pressures are also dealt with in the proposed method of analy For purposes of assessing the strain behavior oi the fabric reinforcements, nonlinear model of hyperbolic form describing the load-extension relation of fabrics is employed. A procedure for specifying the strength characteristics of paraweb polyester fibre multicord, needle punched non-woven geotHxtile and knitted polyester geogrid is also described which may provide a more convenient procedure for incorporating the fablic properties into the prediction of fabric deformations. An attempt to define improvement in bond-linkage at the interconnecting nodes of the fabric reinforced earth stracture due to the confining stress is further made. The proposed method of analysis has been applied to estimate the maximum tensions, deformations and strains of the fabric reinforcements. The results are then compared with those of finite element analysis and experimental tests, and show in general good agreements indicating the effectiveness of the proposed method of analysis. Analytical parametric studies are also carried out to investigate the effects of relative soil-fabric reinforcement stiffness, locked-in stresses, compaction load and seepage pressures on the magnitude and variation of the fabric deformations.