Pipe jacking has been widely used in urban underground engineering construction in recent years. Prediction of ground deformation caused by pipe jacking is particularly important for the safety of construction. With regard to the densely arranged pipes used in the pipe roof structure method, an analytical model of stratum disturbance caused by jacking of parallel rectangular pipes is proposed on the basis of Mindlin’s displacement solution and the stochastic medium theory. The influencing factors such as soil loss, additional thrust on the excavation face, friction between pipe jacking machine and soil, friction between subsequent pipes and soil, and the grouting pressure were comprehensively considered. Then, a 3D numerical simulation and a case study were conducted. The results showed consistent agreement with the analytical solution, and the proposed method can take into account the asymmetry of surface settlement curve induced by construction. A discussion of the ground deformation law shows that the proposed approach can reasonably predict the ground deformation and provide a reference for relevant pipe jacking construction.
The impact of shallow tunnel construction on the surrounding environment is often considered as a symmetric half-plane problem with circular holes. In this research, the analytical solutions of the ground stresses and displacements of a shallow circular tunnel in an elastic half-plane under arbitrary distributed loads on ground surface were derived, based on the complex variable method. Then, an application was implemented to analyze the potential plastic zone induced by shallow tunneling adjacent to the ground surface structures. The verification of the results obtained from the proposed analytical prediction model was carried out using the numerical simulations. Additionally, the influences of different boundary condition (different magnitudes and ranges of arbitrary distributed loads and different symmetric boundary conditions of the tunnel perimeter) on the distribution characteristics of the potential plastic zones were analyzed. In general, the results showed that the larger the pile loads and the closer the relative position between the tunnel and distributed loads, the more distinct the coalesced trends of the potential plastic zones around the tunnel and the potential plastic zones around the distributed loads.