Damage to underground structures caused by liquefaction is one of the important types of hazards in the field of geotechnical engineering. Utility tunnels are the lifeline projects of cities. To ensure the sustainable and safe operation of utility tunnels over a design life of 100 years, this paper investigates the seismic response pattern of utility tunnels in the liquefied site. In this paper, shaking table tests were carried out on the utility tunnel in a layered liquefiable site. Based on the test data, the distribution law of acceleration field and pore pressure field in the model and the deformation of the soil were analyzed first. Then the soil-structure interaction, the strain and uplift of the structure were investigated. The results show that liquefaction of sand layers under strong earthquakes, resulting in seismic energy loss. The acceleration of the upper clay layer is attenuated by the seismic isolation of the liquefied soil. The utility tunnel affects the propagation of soil acceleration, which decays faster beneath the structure for the same height. The process of pore water pressure growth is a process of energy accumulation and the pore water pressure ratio curve and Arias intensity are significantly correlated. During the test, the phenomenon of sand boil appeared, and the cracks appeared on the ground surface and developed continuously. The utility tunnel in liquefied soil is lifted under the action of excess pore water pressure. There are vertical and horizontal displacement differences at the deformation joints. The strain in the utility tunnel at the stratigraphic junction is mainly influenced by the action of the bending moment, large shear deformation in the transverse section. The strain at the connection between the partition wall and the top slab is the largest and is the weak position of the structure, followed by the connection between the side walls and the top slab, and the bottom slab of the structure have a smaller strain. The results provide insights into the dynamic properties of soils and structures in liquefaction sites.
In recent years, there has been a rise in the construction of expansive underground structures and shield tunnels with exceptionally large diameters. These projects introduce unique challenges regarding their impact on the surrounding soil and structures, which differ from those typically encountered in conventional shield tunnels. However, the existing body of research in this specific domain remains insufficient. When such tunnels intersect deep foundation pits supported by piled-raft foundations, the discrepancies in soil deformation can become even more pronounced. At present, there is a dearth of research on the underlying principles governing these differences, and theoretical investigations have not kept pace with practical engineering applications. Consequently, the existing settlement prediction methods employed for diverse projects need to be reevaluated and adjusted to accommodate the distinctive characteristics of each individual project. Regarding the engineering focus of this paper, it is crucial to recognize that soil subsidence in the pit bottom has a significant influence on the mechanical response of the piles. Consequently, the implementation of targeted correction measures remains consistently important. Based on this concept, this paper focuses on a super-large diameter shield tunnel project that under-crossed a deep foundation pit with a piled-raft foundation. The influence of different construction methods on the settlement law of the soil at the bottom of the deep foundation pit is discussed after verification of the accuracy of the model through numerical simulation and field monitoring data. Additionally, two correction coefficients that consider the project’s load characteristics are proposed in this research. These coefficients were used to correct the surface settlement curve. The corrected soil settlement curve at the pit’s bottom can successfully reflect the numerical simulation results, which in turn can reflect the mechanical response of the pile under the influence of tunnel excavation.
In the field of construction engineering, the cracking of concrete structures is a common engineering problem, which has a great impact on the overall stability and service life of the engineered structure. During structural repair, crack detection is the most critical step. Automatic detection significantly reduces the engineering cost and human factor error compared with manual detection. However, due to the changeable environment of the project site and different image specifications, using a single algorithm makes it difficult to balance high efficiency and high accuracy. In this study, we designed a combined recognition method including the region growth algorithm and machine learning regression that can achieve a tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency. Firstly, the regression method learns the image features of the dataset and the specific region growth threshold, and the regression function is trained by using the open-source dataset to determine the region growth threshold using the characteristics of the images included in the tests. The region growth algorithm is used to expand the threshold from the seed points of the image to obtain the crack recognition results. The results show that this method improves the accuracy of SSIM by 7% compared with the traditional region growth algorithm, and does not significantly increase the computational cost, with an increase of 0.78 s per photo process. Compared with the deep learning method, the recognition accuracy of SSIM is decreased by 5.96%, but it takes less resources and has high efficiency.