Hydro-mechanical interaction analysis of high pressure hydraulic tunnel

The reinforced concrete lining of hydraulic tunnel cracks under high internal water pressure and the high pressure water will leak off from the crack surface, which is a typical hydro-mechanical interaction problem. Unfortunately, the analytical and numerical methods used in current engineering practice for simulating the hydro-mechanical interaction of the lining and surrounding rock do not adequately account for the effects of the cracking of lining as well as the conditional cooperation between them. When lining cracks under high internal water pressure, the tensile strain of concrete and reinforcement presents to be nonuniformity and the lining would detach from the surrounding rock in a certain condition. In this paper, the nonuniformity coefficients of reinforcement strain and concrete strain are introduced to compute the secondary permeability of cracked lining and a water-filled joint (WFJ) element is developed to simulate the conditional cooperation between the reinforced concrete lining and surrounding rock. Thus an equivalent coupling method is adopted to calculate the hydro-mechanical interaction in hydraulic tunnel. The results show that the reinforcement stress obtained by the new method and the observed data match well. The phenomenon that the reinforcement stress stays at a lower value in the reinforced concrete tunnel with high internal water pressure is verified.