NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

CE2112 Soil Mechanics
Take-Home Assignment 1 2013/14:
Phase Relations in Tunnelling
1

Problem Statement

Fig. 1. Earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine (after Herrenknecht)

Fig. 2. Skips for moving spoils out of a tunnel.

Figure 1 shows a typical earth pressure balance (EPB) machine which is commonly used in
Singapore for tunneling works. On the left (in green) is the cutting blade which covers the
entire front face of the boring machine. This cutting face is rotated around its longitudinal
axis as the machine is pushed forward, thereby excavating the tunnel. The cut soil, also
known as spoils, falls through openings on the cutting face into a temporary chamber (space
between the green and white portion) from where it is removed using a screw conveyor and

deposited onto a conveyor belt (light blue) located towards the end of the machine. From
there, the spoils are off-loaded onto trolleys on rails known as skips (Figure 2) to be
transported out of the tunnel.
The cutting face of the EPB machine is pressed against the soil as it moves forward. The
pressure between the cutting face and the soil is of critical importance. Too much pressure
will cause the ground in front of the tunnel to heave up as a hump, which damages road
surfaces. On the other hand, if the pressure is insufficient, soil will displace towards the
tunnel face even as the tunnel moves forward. The net effect is that the machine ends up
excavating more soil than it is supposed to. For instance, for every metre of distance moved
by the machine, we may end up losing more than 1 metre worth of soil. The additional soil
lost will accumulated into a void in front of the tunnel face, which slowly migrates up to the
ground surface. Once it reaches the ground surface, the void appears as a sinkhole,
swallowing up houses, cars and everything within it. This is a common tunneling accident.
You are the resident engineer in a tunnel excavation project, where the EPB machine used
has a cutting face with a diameter of 7.5m. In a certain segment of the tunnel drive, sandy soil
was encountered. During site investigation, the properties of the sandy soil have been
measured and shown in Table 1:
Table 1. Soil Properties
Property
Bulk unit weight (kN/m3)
Specific gravity
Degree of saturation on site (%)
Water content (%)
Minimum void ratio
Maximum void ratio

Value
~20
2.62
100
21
0.51
1.15

(a) Indicate, showing calculations where appropriate, whether the values of these
parameters are internally consistent and whether they are of the right order of
magnitude.
(b) You are attempting to develop an approximate method of measuring the amount of
soil removed from the tunnel for every metre of progress of the EPB machine. There
is no volume or weight sensor on the screw conveyor. However, you know that every
skip hold about 0.3m3 of soil. You expect that the soil that is deposited onto each skip
from the screw conveyor is likely to be in a very loose state, with a relative density
near to zero. No water is added to or removed from the soil during excavation, so you
can presume that the water in the soil is likely to remain unchanged, but that there is
likely to be air pockets in the soil deposited onto the skips. Using this information,
estimate
i.
The average weight of soil (including water) in each skip, and
ii.
The number of skips of soil removed for every metre of advance made by the
EPB machine.
2

Administrative Details
The preferred method of submission of your answers is via soft copies onto IVLE into
the workbin Assignment01 - submissions. If your answer comes in several files, e.g. pdf,
xls etc.., you should Winzip all the files into a zip file and name the file with your
matriculation number. Please indicate only your matriculation numbers (not names) on

your solutions. The deadline for submission is Tuesday 4 March 2014 11.59pm. All IVLE
submissions are automatically logged in.