Design of Ground Support to Meet the Challenges present in Tall Tunnels in a High Stress and High Movement Environment in Sydney, Australia.

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_20How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Tunnel support design; high stress; high movement; Sydney; Australia; complex geometry; compressible interface; rock bolt shear

Abstract

Tunnels in Australia are becoming larger, more geometrically complex and are placed in more challenging geological environments. Unique challenges arise on each project and in some cases, bespoke designs are produced to meet specific challenges. It is routine in eastern Australia that parts of a tunnel support system are further reinforced once the monitoring suggests these elements may be overloaded (e.g. rebolting in response to observed shear displacement). Reinforcing the support system is difficult when it comes to tall tunnels. One method employed for tall tunnels involves backfilling the tunnel to enable the equipment to have access to install the needed reinforcement support. This involves significant re-work and can have significant program impacts. It is therefore of particular interest to design a ground support system that can overcome challenges that tall tunnels, particularly in tunnel intersections, in high stress and high movement environments are faced with. This paper explores three different support systems (Conventional rock bolts and thin shotcrete, thick shotcrete with compressible interface, and rock bolt installation with a flexible length) that look at dealing with this challenge. The detailed design considerations, analysis results and relative advantages and disadvantages of each are presented.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jock Russell
AU  - William Wei
AU  - Andrew de Ambrosis
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/07
TI  - Design of Ground Support to Meet the Challenges present in Tall Tunnels in a High Stress and High Movement Environment in Sydney, Australia.
BT  - Proceedings of the Rocscience International Conference 2025 (RIC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 215
EP  - 224
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_20
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_20
ID  - Russell2025
ER  -