ABSTRACT
During construction of tunnels in soft soil settlements are nearly unavoidable. Settlements might induce subsidence and tilts of inner-urban structures nearby and often come along with damages like cracking of facades. Ground movements caused by mechanized tunnelling result in surface settlements. To assess the damage level induced on commonly very different inner-urban structures, two alternative approaches are analyzed and tested for plausibility on a representative reference structure, namely the Limiting Tensile Strain Method and a tilt-based one. Damage assessment is then performed employing a structure's tilt directly or computing shear and bending strains on an idealized deep-beam by means of the limiting tensile strain method. According to the latter one strain are assigned to damage categories uniquely. The structure is idealized as a weightless deep beam whose strains can be easily calculated with respect to bending and shear. Its maximum deflection commonly follows from a point load at center, which is the simplest case.
