ABSTRACT
In the past excavation technologies were mainly driven by the expected ground conditions and the state of the art technologies available in different parts of the world. In principle this situation has not changed a lot, but nowadays many other influencing factors like environmental issues, vibrations, noise, etc. for choosing the best excavation technology have to be considered. The chapter “excavation” deals with the most common excavation technologies, namely NATM and TBM, where a lot of progress was made in the last few years due to intensive research. Furthermore some failure mechanisms which were often observed at different underground construction sites are summarized. As on many tunnel construction sites the excavated materials are still treated as a waste, the outcome of the European research project DRAGON – which was created for developing resource efficient tunneling – shows. The main goal of this related research was to produce high quality raw materials out of the excavated materials, which is of high interest in regions where depositing areas are not available and primary resources for the construction site as well as for the mineral resources consuming industry are rare.
