• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.135-148
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• 2013

Recently, road tunnels have become longer and the plans for long and deep road tunnel have been underway in urban areas. These long and deep tunnel excavations include NATM and TBM. Shield TBM is applied to around 80% of traffic tunnels in Europe, and approximately 30% of them in other developed countries. However, as much of equipment is imported from foreign countries at high prices and distribution rate of TBM tunnel is considerably low in Korea, NATM excavation method is commonly used. To increase TBM tunnel, it is necessary to do assure economic feasibility with the supply-demand of TBM equipment. For this, the selection of standardized TBM diameter is urgently needed. Therefore, the study aims to estimate the standardized optimum section properties of TBM by examining TBM excavation cross section utilization depending on the volume of traffic, the number of lane and its cross-section type(single or double deck), and ventilation system.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.460-468
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• 2021

A TBM is an equipment that excavates a tunnel with a full face by rotating a circular cutter head and its advantages are fast excavation rate and safe construction. A TBM, which is primarily used for tunnel excavation on civil construction sites, is easily adaptable to information and communication technology. Research related to unmanned and automated technology is being actively pursued. TBM applications for mining and energy resource development in other countries were investigated in this study. The difference of TBM applications between the mining and energy resource development and civil construction sites was examined. Technical factors such as geological conditions, depth, site access, TBM launching, alignment and inclination, TBM size, and others that should be considered when choosing a TBM were investigated. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of TBM application in mines and the technical requirements for TBM for successful mine application are summarized.

• Journal of the Korean Geosynthetics Society
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.163-176
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• 2017

The Discrete Element Method (DEM) has been widely used in civil engineering as well as various industrial fields to simulate granular materials. In this study, DEM was adopted to predict the performance of the face plate-type earth pressure balance (EPB) shield TBM (Tunnel Boring Machine). An analysis of the TBM excavation performance was conducted according to two pre-defined excavation conditions with the different rotation speeds per minute (RPM) of the cutterhead. The TBM model which was used in this study has a 6.64 m of diameter and six spokes. Also, 37 precutters and 98 scrapers at an each spoke were modeled with a real-scale specification. From the analysis, compressive forces at the cutterhead face, shield and cutting tools, resistant torques at the cutterhead face, muck discharge rate and accumulated muck discharge by the screw auger were measured and compared.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.261-275
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• 2012

This paper presents numerical analysis of the mud cake infiltration behaviour which is influenced tunnel face stability during excavation by slurry shield TBM. This analysis method can make useful data to select proper shield TBM type and to set up the construction plan. But effective analysis did not proposed until now. In this paper, we carried out numerical analysis using by $PFC^{2D}$ fluid coupling simulation which is suitable for sandy soil modelling. As a analysis result, we checked that the slurry infiltration behaviour varied with soil permeability and slurry characteristic(specific weight, viscosity etc). This analysis method is helpful safety excavation through anticipating the proper slurry viscosity at the design stage and verifying the slurry quality at initial excavation stage.

• Journal of the Society of Disaster Information
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.328-335
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• 2012

The resource-based estimating based on standard unit price of construction work was estimated by multiplying the price per standard unit of work on the amount of labor, material, equipment use time. However, limitation of the resource-based estimating way does not adequately reflect the actual transactions prices. On the subject of water tunnel excavation as a new attempt to overcome these limitations, this study analyzed productivity by work type into cutter inspection/ exchange, TBM maintenance, TBM inspection/refueling, subsequent installations, tramcar, operating change, a cave-underground reinforcement / rock reinforcement, safety / meetings and analyzed actual cost estimating and the net advance rate based on this analysis result. Actual cost estimating calculation approach presented in this study can be utilized as a useful tool to predict the actual cost estimating in the TBM water tunnels field.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1029-1044
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• 2017

The Discrete Element Method (DEM) is one of the useful numerical methods to analyze the behavior of the ground formation by computing the motion and interaction using particles. The DEM has not been applied in civil engineering but also a wide range of industrial fields, such as chemical engineering, pharmacy, material science, food engineering, etc. In this study, to review a performance of the spoke-type earth pressure balance (EPB) shield TBM (Tunnel Boring Machine), the commercial software based on the DEM technology was used. An analysis of the TBM during excavation was conducted according to two pre-defined excavation conditions with the different rotation speed of a cutterhead. During the analysis, the resistant torque at the face of the cutterhead, the compressive force at the cutterhead and shield surface, the muck discharge at the screw auger were measured and compared. Upon the two kinds of excavation conditions, the applicability of the DEM analysis was reviewed as a modelling method for the TBM.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.214-225
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• 2020

Uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) of rock is one of the important factors to determine the advance speed during shield TBM tunnel excavation. UCS can be obtained through the Geotechnical Data Report (GDR), and it is difficult to measure UCS for all tunneling alignment. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to predict UCS by utilizing TBM machine driving data and machine learning technique. Several machine learning techniques were compared to predict UCS, and it was confirmed the stacking model has the most successful prediction performance. TBM machine data and UCS used in the analysis were obtained from the excavation of rock strata with slurry shield TBMs. The data were divided into 8:2 for training and test and pre-processed including feature selection, scaling, and outlier removal. After completing the hyper-parameter tuning, the stacking model was evaluated with the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and the determination coefficient (R²), and it was found to be 5.556 and 0.943, respectively. Based on the results, the sacking models are considered useful in predicting rock strength with TBM excavation data.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.65-85
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• 2023

The use of TBM (Tunnel boring machine) has increased worldwide due to its performance together with the benefit of being safely and environmentally friendly compared to conventional tunneling. In particular, EPB (Earth Pressure Balanced) TBM is widely used because it can be applied to various grounds compared to Open TBM. Also EPB TBM has a simple mechanical structure and advantages in cost, requires less ground area than Slurry TBM. EPB TBM has advantages in soft ground, and more importantly, can extend its applicability by use of appropriate soil conditioning, which improves mechanical and hydrological properties of excavated soil and increases the excavation performance of EPB TBM. Various studies suggested the proper mixing ratio and injection ratio, but almost they are limited to laboratory test under atmospheric pressure such as slump test. Actual field conditions may differ depending on the ground and mechanical condition. In this study, first the amount of used soil conditioning used in the field with various grounds from hard rock to soft ground was estimated through laboratory tests and compared with the estimate in design stage. And also it was compared with the amount used during actual excavation. In addition, experience of soil conditioning for the problems of cutter head clogging and groundwater inrush that occurred during excavation is discussed. Finally, lesson learned for the use of soil conditioning in difficult ground condition such as mixed ground are reviewed.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.201-220
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• 2023

Power cable tunnels is one of the underground structures meant for electricity transmission and are constructed using shield TBM method when transitting across urban and subsea regions. With the increasing shaft depth for tunnels excavation when the shield TBM excavated the rock mass, the review of selecting closed-type shield TBM in rocks becomes necessary. A simplified shield TBM design method is also necessary based on conventional geotechnical survey results. In this respect, design method and related design program are developed based on combined results of full-scale tests, considerable amount of accumulated TBM data, and numerical simulation results. In order to validate the program results, excavation data of a completed power cable tunnel project are utilized. Thrust force, torque, and power of shield TBM specification are validated using Kernel density concept which estimates the population data. The robustness of design expertise is established through this research which will help in stable provision of electricity supply.

• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.347-362
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• 2019

Underground excavation using TBM machines has been increasing to reduce complaints caused by noise, vibration, and traffic congestion resulted from the urban underground construction in Korea. However, TBM excavation design and construction still need improvement because those are based on standards of the technologically advanced countries (e.g., Japan, Germany) that do not consider geological environment in Korea at all. Above all, although TBM performance is a main factor determining the TBM machine type, duration and cost of the construction, it is estimated by only using UCS (uniaxial compressive strength) as the ground parameters and it often does not match the actual field conditions. This study was carried out as part of efforts to predict penetration rate suitable for Korean ground conditions. The effective parameters were defined through the correlation analysis between the penetration rate and the geotechnical parameters or TBM performance parameters. The effective parameters were then used as variables of the multiple regression analysis to derive a regression model for predicting TBM penetration rate. As a result, the regression model was estimated by UCS and joint spacing and showed a good agreement with field penetration rate measured during TBM excavation. However, when this model was applied to another site in Korea, the prediction accuracy was slightly reduced. Therefore, in order to overcome the limitation of the regression model, further studies are required to obtain a generalized prediction model which is not restricted by the field conditions.