Simplified Assessment of Swelling Loads on Underground Structures in Southern Ontario Shales

Synopsis:

Shale formations in southern Ontario exhibit time dependent swelling after excavation that can damage underground structures [1]. Various visco-elastic/plastic constitutive models have been proposed to describe this behavior [2]. These constitutive models are, however, not included in commercially available finite element (FE) programs. This contribution presents a simple approach based on common elasto-plastic constitutive models that may be used in lieu of more complex time-dependent models for the estimation of swelling loads for design.

2021 Euro:TUN, 5th International Conference on Computational Methods and Information Models in Tunneling
October 27-29, 2021, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany (Alsahly, A., Reda, D., Gall, V. E.)