Ive called this lecture the Art of Rock Tunneling to try and differentiate it from science of rock

tunneling, about which you can read a great deal in the literature. The art means the things that
we have to do in conjunction with science of tunnel design to ensure that the tunnels actually are
constructed safely and work. There is a lot of art in tunneling and hopefully well see this evolve as
I go through the lecture.

A definition of the art of tunneling might be this, that it is the recognition of the most probable
failure modes for the rock conditions encountered and the selection of appropriate excavation
sequences and support methods to maintain the tunnel profile.

Tunnel profile is fixed by the function of the tunnel. So that if you have a highway tunnel for 2
lanes of traffic, it has to have certain dimensions, certain height in order to accommodate that
lane width, the services, the ventilation, the drainage, and so on. Or an underground powerhouse
has to have certain dimensions in order to accommodate the machinery that goes into it. So you
are fixed with the profile of a tunnel. And our job is to devise ways of excavating that tunnel to
that profile and maintaining the profile, because any loss of the profile is a loss of efficiency, a loss
of money, a loss of time.

As an example Ive chosen probably the most complicated type of tunneling that wed be involved
in, or underground excavation, and this is an underground powerhouse. A conceptual sketch. Im
not going to go into detail, but you should know that the water comes in from the top left, the
headrace tunnel, as its called, goes through turbines and it comes out through the discharge
tunnel and is discharged back into the river or reservoir.

There are a number a of excavation shapes and sizes in this type of construction and, as you see
from the photographs on the right, you need to sequence very carefully the excavations. So you
would start with a tunnel running right down the middle of the machine hole from which you
would do your exploration and planning. And then you widen that out, carefully installing support
as you go. And finally, in the bottom right is an almost completed cavern with turbines being
installed, at the bottom. And an overhead crane, which is installed earlier in the construction, to
help you get the equipment and to remove the rock.

So there is more than digging a hole and putting support into it in tunneling, theres a lot of
activity that goes on to ensure that you achieve these goals of maintaining the profile. In order to
determine what kind of problem you might encounter, Ive constructed this matrix of 9 conditions.
There are many more than that, and I have diagrams which are much larger than this, but this is
about as simple as I could make it. And so, starting at the top left you have very high quality rock,
intact, low stress and the tunneling is very simple. You dont need support, you dont need any
special conditions. You just go ahead and mine. And then as you work your way down that column
on the left, as the tunnel gets deeper and deeper, the stresses get higher and higher. And if you
get down to 2 or 3 km below surface, you can expect to get conditions where the rock will fail
pretty catastrophically, and in the worst case as what we call rockbursts.

In the middle, the top center block in the matrix, and this is very close to surface, is controlled by
the structural features, so the blocks literally drop out or slide out because theres not sufficient
confinement to keep them in place, so thats a special case. And as the stresses higher, as you go
deeper down, the rock is more closely interlocked and much more stable.
On the right-hand side, the column there, which Ive called sheared rock, is rock that has been
tectonically disturbed. Generally in alpine environments or in the Himalayas in India, the Andes in
South America, the Rockies in North America, these have been formed by huge movements of the
crustal plates. And they have, in this movement, in the mountain formation process, severely
deformed and in many cases broken the rock up into almost soil-like characteristics. So thats a
special category, which obviously gets worse as you go deeper. So lets break this down into some
simpler elements. And the first one is shown here as generally excellent tunneling conditions, or
you might call it the sweet spot of tunneling.

If youre lucky with your tunnel, you might get to work in these conditions occasionally, where
youre either in very good intact rock or youre in jointed rock, but where the stresses are high
enough to clamp it but not high enough to break it. And so those are very good tunneling
conditions. And then we come to this oddball, right in the middle there, of blocky rock at very low
stresses. And youll see in the sketch included there that you can have wedges or blocks either
sliding or falling out of the rock mass, which youve exposed by your excavation of the tunnel.
Looking at an example, this is from a project in Argentina many years ago where you can see a
wedge has fallen out the roof of that tunnel and so simplistically, you would say well this is just a
question of 3-dimensional geometry.

You can go in there and measure the discontinuities that have caused the failure and design a
rockbolt pattern that has sufficient capacity to keep that rock in place, and thats the answer.
Unfortunately, its not quite that simple, because the question then arises. And this particular
tunnel was 12 m in span, taken as a top heading and then benched down another 10 m, so it was
the tailrace tunnel of a hydro scheme, and 12 m span, 18 m high. So were looking at the top
heading, the first 8 m of excavation. And to go in there and install rockbolts is not as simple as it
sounds when you say it. This is a photograph, which might be a littles bit difficult for you to
interpret, but you can see a man in the middle of the photograph there drilling a hole for a
rockbolt using what we call a jack leg or a drill with a jack forcing it into the rock. And you dont
need me to tell you thats a very dangerous operation. So you come to ask yourself, Can I really
put people under an 8 m wide span, fully open, and ask them to do that job? The answer is no,
you cant. So how do we overcome that? The answer is deceptively simple when you think it
through, and it introduces the concept of pilot tunneling, which we use a lot in tunnel driving. So if
you take your 8 m span and you drive a tunnel 6 m wide in the middle of it, 6 m is wide enough
that you get your machinery in there and still do your job, but the wedge that you allow to form is
now reduced from a wedge of 123 tons of weight to a wedge of 29 tons of weight. Its also much
more tightly clamped, because youve got a smaller span, not as much relief. And so its pretty
much guaranteed that wedge would be stable and you could get in there and put the bolts in. but
you put the bolts for the final wedge youre expecting to occur when you open it up to 8 m, so you
do it effectively in 2 stages. You drive the pilot tunnel ahead, you support the rock overhead and
10 m behind you drive the wings forward so youre not impeding progress. The tunnel is still
moving ahead at the same rate, but in 2 steps of the pilot tunnel and then the wings. And this is a
technique that we will see more and more of as I go through the lecture. Heres an example from a
very shallow excavation of 18 m span for an underground station cavern on the Oporto Metro in
Portugal.
So this is going to be a large station cavern, and its only about 20or 30 m underground and its in
weathered granite, so pretty much soil with loose boulders in it very difficult material to support
and if you get it wrong, youre going to drop the whole thing into the cavern, guaranteed, but
what was done in this case is that the first step in the process was to drill, as you see on the left
hand side here, 12 m long holes into the rock above the cavern youre going to create and to flush
the soil out of those with high pressure water and to fill them with cement or concrete. So that
you are forming an umbrella of closely spaced holes of concrete and a concrete arch over the face,
because not only do you have the roof trying to fall in, but the face is also coming towards you
because its unstable. So that protects the face, it enables you to get in and now you can do your
pilot tunnel through that protected area, as you see on the right. So you see a machine working
there, excavating the material and installed behind it is a structure of typically lattice girders and
shotcrete, or shotcrete fiber-reinforced or some lining that is sufficiently strong to hold the
excavation while youre creating the pilot tunnel, and then this wall is sacrificial, you remove that,
and you remove the rest of the tunnel, but you do it sequentially so that you are never allowing
any area of the roof to be unsupported, under which you are working.

Moving now to the left-hand column of massive rock under increasing stress, the failure of this
rock under increasing stress is really a function of tensile spalling. So, as youll see in a moment the
stresses, when they ae high enough on the boundary that youve created by excavating the tunnel,
exceed the tensile strength of the rock and you get splinters or plates or silvers of rock forming, as
you see in the lower right-hand photograph there, and these become increasingly violent and loud
as the stresses increase

So this hopefully has been a brief summary of some of the art that goes with the science of tunnel
engineering and that enables us to construct tunnels in what I think you will agree are some very,
very difficult rock and stress conditions that we are increasingly encountering around the world.
As the population of the world increases, we need more and more space and more and more of
our infrastructure is going underground. More and more mountain tunnels are needed to bring
water and oil and transportation, people, from one place to other. And so these difficult tunnel are
increasingly going to be our daily bread in the field of rock engineering.