Study on the Influence of Different Control Modes on TBM Disc Cutter Performance by Rotary Cutting Tests

Excerpt

With the rapid development of China’s economy, more and more underground openings in complex grounds are being constructed or planned, e.g. transportation, mining and hydro-power plant tunnels in mixed grounds or under high in situ stress. Therefore, for the advantages of higher advance rate and construction safety, lower cost and environmental disturbance over the conventional methods, the tunnel boring machine (TBM) tunnelling method is widely used in recent years as a highly automatic mechanized excavation technique. Substantial amount of studies have been carried out to investigate the problems concerning the TBM design and the performance prediction in the last 40 years, mainly including theoretical, numerical, laboratory, and field studies. In theoretical studies, researchers have developed many models to predict disc cutter cutting forces by assuming different rock cutting mechanisms (Roxborough and Phillips 1975; Bilgin 1977; Ozdemir et al. 1977; Sanio 1985; Rostami and Ozdemir 1993;Rostami 1997; Tumac and Balci 2015). In numerical studies, researchers have conducted many rock indentation and cutting modelling tests to capture the rock cutting process and patterns (Liu et al. 2002; Gong et al. 2006; Cho et al. 2010; Ma et al. 2011; Moon and Oh 2012; Geng et al. 2016; Carlos et al. 2017; Xiao et al. 2017). In laboratory studies, researchers have performed many rock indentation and cutting tests to investigate the performance of disc cutter in different rock types and cutting conditions (Gertsch et al. 2007; Balci and Tumac 2012; Cho et al. 2013; Rostami 2013; Yin et al. 2014a; Geng et al. 2016; Liu et al. 2016; Ma et al. 2016). In field studies, researchers have employed the in situ excavation data to study the penetration rate, advance rate, cutter wear and specific measures in different geological conditions (Ribacchi and Fazio 2005; Gong and Zhao 2009; Hassanpour et al. 2010, 2011; Yin et al. 2014b; Liu et al. 2017a, b). …