• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.295-308
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• 2018

The excavation of twin tunnels is a process that destabilizes the ground. The stability of the tunnel lining, the control of ground displacements around the tunnel resulting from each excavation and the interaction between them must be controlled. This paper provides a new approach for replacing the costly 3D analyses with the equivalent 2D analyses that closely reflects the in-situ measurements when excavating twin tunnels. The modeling was performed in two dimensions using the FLAC2D finite difference code. The three-dimensional effect of excavation is taken into account through the deconfinement rate ${\lambda}$ of the soil surrounding the excavation by applying the convergence-confinement method. A comparison between settlements derived by the proposed 2D analysis and the settlements measured in a real project in Algeria shows an acceptable agreement. Also, this paper reports the investigation into the changes in deformations on tunnel linings and surface settlements which may be expected if the twin tunnels of T4 El-Harouche Skikda were constructed with a tunneling machine. Special attention was paid to the influence of the excavation phase shift distance between the two mechanized tunnel faces. It is revealed that the ground movements and the lining deformations during tunnel excavation depend on the distance between the tunnels' axis and the excavation phase shift.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.31-37
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• 2014

In situ investigations and laboratory tests using elastic wave have become popular in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering. Propagation velocity of elastic wave is the key index to evaluate the ground characteristics. To evaluate this, various methods were used in both time domain and frequency domain. In time domain, the travel time can be found from the two points that have the same phase such as peaks or first rises. Cross-correlation can also be used in time domain by evaluating the time shift amount that makes the product of signals of input and received waveforms maximum. In frequency domain, wave propagation velocity can be evaluated by computing the phase differences between the source and received waves. In this study, wave propagation velocity evaluated by the methods listed above were compared. Bender element tests were conducted on the specimens cut from the undisturbed hand-cut block samples obtained from Block 37 excavation site in Chicago, IL, US. The evaluation methods in time domain provides relatively wide range of wave propagation velocities due to the noise in signals and the sampling frequency of data logger. Frequency domain approach provides relatively accurate wave propagation velocities and is irrelevant to the sampling frequency of data logger.