Passive instability of longitudinally inclined shallowly-buried shield tunnel using physical model tests and DEM simulations

Stability of tunnel face is crucial, but previous studies often overlooked the effect of longitudinal tunnel inclination, leading to inaccurate stability assessments. In this study, nine groups of 1 g model tests were conducted to study the influence of longitudinal tunnel inclination on passive limit support pressure and passive failure mode of soil in front of the tunnel face under shallow burial conditions (i.e., cover depth ratio of 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75) in a sand stratum. In addition, discrete element method (DEM) analyses at the same scale were established and calibrated against the model test results. Accordingly, the micromechanical information of soil was derived from a microscopic perspective. The results indicate that upon the passive instability of tunnel face, the soil in front of the tunnel face firstly moved approximately perpendicular to the tunnel face, and then it deflected. The instability area of soil in front of the tunnel face increased with the decrease of longitudinal inclination, when the tunnel cover depth was fixed. Furthermore, microscopic analyses indicate that the longitudinal inclination could significantly affect the soil contact orientation in front of the tunnel face. This was more likely to cause the failure zone to rotate.