• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.470-486
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• 2015

Two-arch tunnels require minimal spacing between the 2 tunnels and thus occupy small amount of land compared to parallel tunnels. But it is rather expensive. The parallel tunnel is not as expensive, but it requires more land than 2-arch tunnels. This may cause a problem when there is a land shortage. The new design is to connect these two types of tunnels by another pair of parallel tunnels where the separation distance is gradually increasing. The applicability of this new design to the cases where rock condition is not even fair has to be verified since the width of the pillar between the connecting tunnels can be quite narrow. Therefore both two and three dimensional numerical analyses were conducted and pillar stability was examined for rock classes IV and V in two different ways. Results showed that this new design is still effective for poor rock conditions if central pillar is properly reinforced by tension bolts as long as overburden is less than five times of the tunnel diameter.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.699-714
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• 2022

The objective of this study is to suggest a safe and economical pillar reinforcement method when very near-twin tunnels with a minimum interval of 1 m passes through a soft zone such as weathered soil or weathered rock. A standard cross-sectional view of a two-lane road tunnel was applied to suggest a pillar reinforcement method for the very near-twin tunnels. The thickness of the pillar was 1 m. The ground condition around the tunnel was weathered soil or weathered rock. There were four reinforcement methods for pillar stability evaluation. These were rock bolt reinforcement, pre-stressed steel strand reinforcement, horizontal steel pipe grouting reinforcement, horizontal steel pipe grouting + prestressed steel strand reinforcement. When the ground condition was weathered soil, only the pillar reinforced the horizontal steel pipe grouting + prestressed steel strand did not failed. When the ground condition was weathered rock, there were no failure of the pillar reinforced the horizontal steel pipe grouting or the horizontal steel pipe grouting + prestressed steel strand. It is considered that the horizontal steel pipe grouting reinforcement played a role in increasing the stability of the upper part of the pillar by supporting the upper load applied to the upper part of the pillar.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.487-495
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• 2014

In this study, in order to suggest the design method for supports in the room-and-pillar underground structure, the case study was carried out. In the case study, shape of rock pillar and room was mainly considered. From the analysis, a displacement at the roof, the maximum principle stress and plastic state were examined. To optimize variables in the case study, cases from the Seoul metro station were analyzed, then a target depth of the underground structure and ground conditions were determined. And the height of rock pillar and room were chosen from the assumed purpose of underground space, i.e. living/office and warehouse. Total cases of analysis was 180 cases including 3 types of ground condition, 5 types of rock pillar and 6 types of roof span. It is expected that results from analysis can be used to determine the installation of support in room-and-pillar underground structure with stability, utilization efficiency of underground space and applicability of vehicles.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.299-310
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• 2014

Nationally, tunnel and underground constructions are necessary for the environmental sustainability and the efficient use of land space. For the importance of eco-friendly circumstances, 2-arch or large road tunnel has been designed so far. However, such a 2-arch or large tunnel has problems in terms of cost, constructability, construction period, and maintenance. Therefore, in this study, tunnel behavior and stability of rock pillar according to the pillar width and cover depth for parallel tunnels are investigated by performing FE analysis and using empirical formula. According to the results, Rock pillar is reinforced for distributed vertical load by Tie-Bolt due to unpredicted ground deformation, and the reinforced rock pillar's behaviour from the FE analysis shows a quite good agreement with field measurement. According to ground conditions, if the pillar width of the parallel tunnels is reduced, it can be more efficient in use of the tunnel space compared to previous tunnels.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.381-390
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• 2004

In this study, scaled model tests were performed to investigate the deformation behaviors around twin tunnels. Eleven types of test models which had respectively different pillar widths, rock types and loading conditions were mode, where the modelling materials were the mixture of sand, plaster and water. The models with shallower pillar width were cracked under lower pressure than the models with thicker pillar width, and they showed the more tunnel convergences and the clear spatting failures. The models of hard rock were cracked under 50% higher pressure than the models of soft rock and they showed the less tunnel convergences. The failure and deformation behaviors of twin tunnels were also dependent on the loading conditions of models. Futhermore, the results of FLAC analysis were qualitatively coincident with the test results.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.472-482
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• 2023

The grid-type or room-and-pillar method is applied for the purpose of mining horizontally buried minerals. In this study, design and pilot test were performed to apply the room-and-pillar method which uses natural rock as a rock pillar to the construction of underground space. The area where the pilot test was conducted was in stone mine and had good rock conditions with an appropriate depth (about 30 m) to apply the pilot test. The pilot test site was selected by reviewing accessibility and ground conditions and then site construction was performed through detailed ground investigation and design. The pilot test was designed with a column shape of 8×8 m and a cross-section of 8×12 m. The blasting pattern was determined through test blasting at the site, and blasting of 3 m excavation with 89 holes was performed. Through field observations, the average width of 12.5 m and the average height of 8.3 m were measured. Therefore, it is possible to proceed similar to the cross-sectional shape considered in the design.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.226-241
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• 2020

The stability of underground mine cavity is closely related with pillar strength. The vulnerability of pillars can be judged and reinforced if the pillar strength is known. The pillar strength is affected by characteristics of discontinuities and shape of a pillar. The change of pillar strength due to a discontinuity passing through the center of a pillar, width-to-height ratio of a pillar and small joints existing within a pillar was analyzed using PFC 3D. The result showed that the pillar strength is influenced by dip angle of a discontinuity and it increases as width-to-height ratio of a pillar increases. The pillar strength decreases as the number of contained joints increases. The relationship between total trace length observable from the pillar surface and the pillar strength was regressed with exponential function. The correlation coefficient of the regression was high enough so that pillar strength can be predicted using total trace length if a joint set exists in a pillar. Lastly, the method to estimate the strength of a pillar that includes two joint sets was proposed if the joint dip angles are 60°, 30°. The method also need total trace lengths of two joint sets.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.136-142
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• 1997

The behaviour of ground movement during the construction of two parallel tunnels in weathered zone and soft rock has been investigated. All the influencing factors for the behaviour of twin tunnel such as tunnel size, ground conditions, tunnel depth, pillar width and initial state of ground stresses were examined The results of FEM nonlinear analysis were compared with some of model test results in weathered zone to verify the numerical method. It was found that minimum interference was obtained in the parallel construction case when the twin tunnel distance (pillar width) is just over the twice of tunnel diameter. Guide line for the interference of twin tunnelling has been introduced for the ground of weathered zone and soft rock.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.346-355
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• 2019

When evaluating pillar stability in very closely spaced tunnels, a local safety factor (strength/stress ratio) at the minimum width has been widely used. Tension bolts have been frequently applied as reinforcement for the cases where safety factors are less than 1.0 from FEM stress analysis. However, the local safety factor shows a constant value irrespective of the change in pillar width/tunnel diameter (PW/D) and the safety factor of the pillar is underestimated because the variation of deviation stress is relatively small even when the pre-stressing is applied to the tension bolt. In addition, the average safety factor proposed by Hoek and Brown(1980) was reviewed, but the pillar safety factor was relatively overestimated when the width of the pillar was increased. As an alternative, the SRM safety factor using shear strength reduction method shows the effect of changing the safety factor in the case of no reinforcement and tension bolt reinforcement as the pillar width/tunnel diameter(PW/D) changes. The failure shape is also similar to the previous limit theory result. In this study, the safety factor was evaluated without considering rock bolt and shotcrete to distinguish reinforcing effect of tension bolt.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.107-121
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• 2022

Coal pillar assessment is of broad importance to underground engineering structure, as the pillar failure can lead to enormous disasters. Because of the highly non-linear correlation between the pillar failure and its influential attributes, conventional forecasting techniques cannot generate accurate outcomes. To approximate the complex behavior of coal pillar, this paper elucidates a new idea to forecast the underground coal pillar stability using combined unsupervised-supervised learning. In order to build a database of the study, a total of 90 patterns of pillar cases were collected from authentic engineering structures. A state-of-the art feature depletion method, t-distribution symmetric neighbor embedding (t-SNE) has been employed to reduce significance of actual data features. Consequently, an unsupervised machine learning technique K-mean clustering was followed to reassign the t-SNE dimensionality reduced data in order to compute the relative class of coal pillar cases. Following that, the reassign dataset was divided into two parts: 70 percent for training dataset and 30 percent for testing dataset, respectively. The accuracy of the predicted data was then examined using support vector classifier (SVC) model performance measures such as precision, recall, and f₁-score. As a result, the proposed model can be employed for properly predicting the pillar failure class in a variety of underground rock engineering projects.