ABSTRACT

A new railway infrastructure next to Barcelona city required the excavation of a 10,60 m diameter EPB TBM tunnel through the soft deltaic sediments close to the sea, consisting of a thick sequence of loose sands and soft silty clays below the water table. This paper addresses the main issues of the tunnel bore below a complex structure resting on heterogeneous direct and deep foundations, either short floating piles having their tip above the tunnel and deep column piles. Two different three-dimensional numerical models have been run to evaluate the movements of the building during the process of excavation of the tunnels, in order to capture both the specifics of the soil non-linearities and the structure deformability. The model results’ have been compared to the settlement data obtained from the monitoring during excavation and the building behavior has been evaluated in term of the structural capacity and the foundation pile capacity during the tunnel advancement.