ABSTRACT
The interest into the distribution of strains and stresses around tunnels was soon recognized, in order to describe the change from the initial “in situ” condition to that subsequent to excavation. Along this line, for a “continuous homogeneous and linearly elastic” medium, the attention was on computing the stress distribution around openings of different shapes (Sokolnikoff 1956, Savin 1961, Muskhelishvili 1963). Figure 2 shows a typical example of such studies (Barla 1970).
