Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 16 2001.

59 62

Interaction of circular holes in an innite elastic medium

C.B. Kooi, A. VerruijtU
Delft Uni ersity of Technology, Department of Ci il Engineering, 2628 CN Delft, The Netherlands Received 11 December 2000; accepted 26 February 2001

Abstract Problems of a single cavity or a series of cavities in an innite or semi-innite elastic medium are of considerable interest for the analysis of stress concentration factors near the boundaries of the cavities. In the mining industry, interest in problems of this type mainly derives from displacements that occur at the soil surface, which may cause considerable damage. Similar damage may occur when constructing tunnels in densely populated areas. Analytical expressions for the subsidence due to multi-tunnelling activities usually do not match very well with the measured eld results. One of the possible explanations for the discrepancy between the two is the interaction of the tunnels. Simple superposition of the effects of each tunnel may give reasonable results if the distance between the tunnels is large, but not when the tunnels are constructed close together. To gain more insight into the phenomenon of interaction, an analytical solution is presented in this paper for an innite elastic medium. Comparison of the solution with two computer packages, FLAC 2D and PLAXIS, supports the nding that the interaction of circular holes indeed causes an increase in the displacements. 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Elastic medium; Tunnels; Circular holes

1. Introduction The problem of a single circular hole in an innite elastic plate, with a uniform state of stress at innity, has a simple solution, described by Timoshenko and Goodier 1970.. This solution can be used as a rst approximation for the vertical displacement of the surface in case of a single cavity in an elastic half plane. This approximation is applicable for a tunnel at a sufciently large depth. For tunnels at shallow depth, the inuence of the boundary condition at the free surface must be taken into account. A full analytical solution of this problem using complex variable analysis has been given by Verruijt 1998., and an approximation using an imaging technique was presented by Sagaseta 1987.. The present paper addresses the problem of two parallel tunnels, constructed close together,
U

Corresponding author. Tel.: q31-15-278-5280; fax: q31-15-2783328. E-mail address: a.verruijt@planet.nl A. Verruijt..

at sufcient depth to justify neglecting the effect of the free surface, see Fig. 1. For this case, the calculation of the stresses can be performed using bipolar co-ordinates as introduced by Jeffery 1921.. The stress concentration factors in the vicinity of the two cavities have been discussed by Howland and Knight 1939., Green 1940. and Ling 1948.. The method of bipolar co-ordinates fails to give explicit expressions for the displacements, however. In order to derive expressions for the displacements as well, the problem may be solved using Schwarz alternating method, see Sokolnikoff 1956., in which successive approximations are made by alternately satisfying the boundary conditions on each of the two cavities. A second order approximation using this method has been given by Zimmerman 1988.. This paper presents a generalisation of this method using as many terms as required for sufcient accuracy. In order to validate the results, data will be compared with the results of numerical analysis using a nite difference or a nite element solution.

0886-7798r01r$ - see front matter 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 8 8 6 - 7 7 9 8 0 1 . 0 0 0 2 7 - X

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C.B. Kooi, A. Verruijt r Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 16 (2001) 59 62

qBj j j y 1 .

sin j . a r/ 5

Fig. 1. Denitions for two tunnels.

2. The solution method The general solution for a circular cavity in an innite medium, with an arbitrary load at the cavity boundary has been given by Timoshenko and Goodier 1970.. If the stresses at innity are supposed to vanish, this solution can be written as ur s

A ar / q B j q 2 y 4 . a = / 5 acos j, r
js 0

jq 1

jy 1

u s

A ar / q B j y 4 q 4 . a = / 5 asin j, r
js 0

jq 1

jy 1

where a is the radius of the cavity, and where B0 s B1 s 0. In case of plane strain deformations the stresses corresponding to this displacement eld are r r sy 2
js 0

A j q 1. ar /
j

jq 2

qBj j q 2 . j y 1 . s 2
js 0

cos j , a r/ 5
jq 2

The procedure now is that rstly, only a single term is taken in the boundary conditions for the rst cavity, representing a tensile radial stress at this cavity, balancing the uniform compressive. stress p 0 in the undisturbed medium. The inuence of this load on the radial normal stress and the shear stress on the boundary of the second cavity can then be determined from the general solution given above, and it will appear that these stresses are unequal to zero. These two stress distributions can then be expanded into a Fourier series in terms of polar co-ordinates around the centre of the second cavity, and these stresses can then be balanced by a loading of opposite sign at the boundary of the second cavity, using the same series expansion as given above, but with r now representing the distance from the second cavity. The resulting stresses on the boundary of the rst cavity can then be calculated, which will again appear to be unequal to zero. Again these stresses can be expanded into a Fourier series in terms of polar co-ordinates around the centre of the rst cavity, and, in its turn, these stresses can be balanced by another load at the boundary of the rst cavity. This process can be continued until the correction to be applied is practically zero. The method has been used to construct a second order approximation by Zimmerman 1988., with a single correction of the stresses at the boundary of the second cavity. By generalising the procedure, using the general expressions for the eld of stresses and displacements around one cavity, and using Fourier series expansions of the resulting stresses on the boundary of the other cavity, all performed in a relatively simple computer program, the errors in the approximation can be made arbitrarily small. The number of successive alternative iterations needed to achieve a certain accuracy depends upon the distance of the two cavities, of course. In the computer program, the iterations stop when the relative error of the constants in the expansions is less than 10y1 0 . This may require up to 50 iterations when the cavities are close together with a gap of only 5% of the radius of the cavities..

3. Stresses The method described above has been tested for values of the distance d between the centres of the two cavities in the range d r a s 2.1 10.0. For very large values of the distance between the two tunnels, their interaction appears to be so small that a simple superposition of the stresses produced by each of the tunnels in an innite medium, is accurate enough. In order to check the performance of the method for tunnels at

a A j j q 1. r

/
cos j , a r/ 5
jq 2 j

qBj j y 2 . j y 1 . r sy 2

js 0

A j q 1. ar /
j

C.B. Kooi, A. Verruijt r Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 16 (2001) 59 62

61

Fig. 2. Results compared with FLAC2D and PLAXIS.

Fig. 3. Scaled displacements for y s d.

smaller distances, the tangential stress along the line between the two tunnels has been calculated, and compared with the numerical results obtained using the computer programs FLAC2D Itasca Consulting Group Inc., 1995. and PLAXIS Brinkgreve and Vermeer, 1998.. The results from the various programs for the case d r a s 4 are shown in Fig. 2. The results of the two computer programs are very close to those of the analytical solution using the full interaction procedure, although the numerical values are slightly larger than the analytical ones, especially near the boundaries of the cavities. The stress concentration factors in the points on the cavity boundary on the horizontal axis are shown in Table 1, as calculated by three methods: simple superposition of the solutions for two single cavities; the Schwarz alternating method described in this paper; and the method of bipolar co-ordinates used by Ling 1948..

4. Displacements Perhaps the main advantage of the method of successive approximations presented in this paper is that it also gives closed form expressions for the displacements. As an example, the vertical displacements at the
Table 1 Maximum stress concentration factors on the cavity boundary dra 3 4 6 10 Superposition 1.2500 1.1111 1.0400 1.0123 1.0000 Interaction 1.8873 1.4108 1.1546 1.0488 1.0000 Ling 1.887 1.411 1.155 1.049 1.000

level y s d are shown in Fig. 3, for a value of Poissons ratio of s 0.25 and for d r a s 4, which means that the gap between the two cavities is equal to the sum of their radii. The data obtained by the computer program, taking into account full interaction of the two cavities are shown as a fully drawn curve, whereas the dashed curve indicates the results obtained by simply superimposing the effects of the two cavities. It appears that in this case, the interaction of the cavities leads to 15% larger displacements in the centre. The effect strongly depends upon the relative distance of the cavities as illustrated in Table 2, which shows the multiplication factor of the maximum vertical displacement due to the interaction effect of the two cavities, for s 0.25, various values of d r a, and for two values of the depth of the cavities below the surface. It appears that the interaction effect is signicant only if the gap between the two cavities is small. For cavities very close to each other, the effect may be that the displacements at the surface are almost doubled. It may be noted that such small distances occur frequently in engineering practice when two parallel tunnels are being constructed, especially near underground stations.

Table 2 The effect of interaction on the displacements dra 2.1 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 ysd 1.837 1.268 1.143 1.090 1.062 1.045 1.035 y s 5d 1.857 1.311 1.175 1.114 1.080 1.059 1.045

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C.B. Kooi, A. Verruijt r Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 16 (2001) 59 62 Itasca Consulting Group Inc, 1995. FLAC Users Manual Version 3.3. Itasca, Minneapolis. Jeffery, G.B., 1921. Plane stress and plane strain in bipolar coordinates. Phil. Trans. A 221, 265 293. Ling, C.B., 1948. On the stresses in a plate containing two holes. J. Appl. Phys. 19, 77 82. Sagaseta, S., 1987. Analysis of undrained soil deformation due to ground loss. Geotechnique 37, 301 320. Sokolnikoff, I.S., 1956. Mathematical Theory of Elasticity, 2nd Ed. McGraw-Hill, New York. Timoshenko, S.P., Goodier, J.N., 1970. Theory of Elasticity, 3rd Ed. McGraw-Hill, New York. Verruijt, A., 1998. Deformations of an elastic half plane with a circular cavity. Int. J. Solids Structures 35, 2795 2804. Zimmerman, R.W., 1988. Second-order approximation for the compression of an elastic plate containing a pair of circular holes. ZAMM 68, 575 577.

5. Conclusions It has been shown that the displacements of the soil surface due to the creation of a tunnel a very long circular cavity. may be considerably larger in case of the presence of an existing parallel tunnel. The interaction effect can be calculated using a relatively simple iteration procedure. References
Brinkgreve, R.B.J., Vermeer, P.A., 1998. PLAXIS Manual Version 7. Balkema, Rotterdam. Green, A.E., 1940. General biharmonic analysis for a plate containing circular holes. Proc. Roy. Soc. A 176, 121 132. Howland, R.C.J., Knight, R.C., 1939. Stress functions for a plate containing groups of circular holes. Phil. Trans. A 238, 357 392.