Deterministic and reliability-based design of necessary support pressures for tunnel faces

This paper provides methods for the deterministic and reliability-based design of the support pressures necessary to prevent tunnel face collapse. The deterministic method is developed by extending the use of the unique load multiplier, which is embedded within OptumG2/G3 with the intention of determining the maximum load that can be supported by a system. Both two-dimensional and three-dimensional examples are presented to illustrate the applications. The obtained solutions are validated according to those derived from the existing methods. The reliability-based method is developed by incorporating the Response Surface Method and the advanced first-order second-moment reliability method into the bisection algorithm, which continuously updates the support pressure within previously determined brackets until the difference between the computed reliability index and the user-defined value is less than a specified tolerance. Two-dimensional reliability-based support pressure is compared and validated via Monte Carlo simulations, whereas the three-dimensional solution is compared with the relationship between the support pressure and the resulting reliability index provided in the existing literature. Finally, a parametric study is carried out to investigate the influences of factors on the required support pressure.