3-D FEM Simulation Analysis Of Excavation Load On Cutterhead In Shield Tunneling Machine

With the rapid development of our economy，The acceleration of urbanizationand large-scale infrastructure construction result in people living in a more nervousspace. In order to alleviate this contradiction, people pay more attention to thedevelopment and utilization of underground space. Shield tunneling technology is amajor method in the tunnel construction as a kind of tunneling method underground,because of its efficient, safety, low cost and priority for environment.Cutterhead is the most important component of the shield tunneling machine.The complicated load distribution of cutting head in poor working conditions relatesto the design and the efficiency of the construction. Due to its structure characteristicsand special working environment, the load is hard to measure directly duringtunneling process. It is significant for providing helpful and useful information for theoptimization of topological structure of the cutterhead and location arrangement of thecutters in manufactural engineering.In this paper, FEM is used for numerical simulation of interaction between thecutterhead and the excavation face in tunneling process, in which a3D cutterheadmodel is established, and the extended Drucker-Prager elastoplastic model is selectedfor the soil concerning to its material nonlinearity. During the excavating simulation,soil cutting including cutting scrap forming and cutting scrap separating is simulatedby using the progressive damage and failure rules, which contain element deletefunction. Based on the above established models the interaction between thecutterhead and the excavation face is simulated and analyzed. It is demonstrated thatthe method we proposed in this paper is effective in the loading distribution analysisof the cutterhead and the results of the simulation provide effective information forthe design of the cutterhead.