New work on soft ground tunnelling published

Authored by Dr Benoit Jones of Inbye Engineering, ‘Soft Ground Tunnel Design’ is aimed at MSc students and graduate engineers, as well as experienced engineers new to soft ground tunnelling. However, accomplished tunnel design experts may also find it to be a useful reference work containing new and interesting insights, as well as a compilation of methods and a summary of the state of the art.

Each chapter begins with an introduction that sets out the learning points – things the reader can understand and do after reading each chapter. Throughout the book there are numerous worked examples that take readers through the various calculation stages, and at the end of each chapter they can practice working on set problems.

The three principal themes of the book are stability, prediction of ground movements, and structural design of the tunnel lining. These themes are the key to understanding tunnels and are the basis for choosing the construction method and lining type.

The reader is guided through the basic principles of soil-structure interaction, the three-dimensional effects of construction sequence and the effects of construction on other structures, in steps of gradually increasing complexity from basic principles to sophisticated design. As the calculations become more complex, it is more and more important that they remain grounded in an in-depth understanding of how real tunnels behave. For this reason, the first chapter starts with case studies of real tunnel behaviour to provide a conceptual framework of what happens to the tunnel lining and what goes on in the ground around a tunnel in terms of displacements, stresses and strains.

The book also presents all the most commonly used design methods, deriving them step-by-step from first principles.

Commenting on the publication’s release, Jones said: “In original papers there are often missing steps in derivations, missing information, implicit assumptions that are not explained, and even errors. It is alarming to consider how often these errors have been inherited, used and disseminated over the years. Hopefully, they are now set out transparently and correctly.”