Estimation of the Distributions of Earth Pressure around a Tunnel

Abstract

When excavating a tunnel, earth pressure acting on surrounding ground increase as the overburden load acting on the tunnel is redistributed to the surrounding ground. Though a lot of theories, from Terzaghi's theory down, have been proposed for estimating the magnitude of earth pressure acting on a tunnel, there's almost no method for predicting the distributions of earth pressure around a tunnel. In this study, a method for calculating the earth pressure distributions around a tunnel is proposed. By comparing calculated value with experimental value, it is found that the explained method can be applied for forecasting the earth pressure distributions around a tunnel support system.