Evaluation of Risk of Building Damage due to Deep Excavations via Numerical Modelling

In the densely populated urban environment, ground movements induced by deep excavations inevitably present a risk of damage to adjacent buildings and structures. An important and necessary aspect to justify the engineering design is to evaluate the degree of risk of such damage. This paper presents a specific procedure to evaluate the engineering design by assessing the risk level of building damage based on the deformation profiles along the ground surface which are calculated via numerical modelling and verified by empirical methods. This procedure is afterwards applied to justify the engineering design of the extension line construction of a metro project between PK0 + 344.00 and PK0 + 407.00 with the cut-and-cover excavation method. The results demonstrate that the damage risk levels of all the buildings adjacent to the excavations are within category level 0 indicating that the relevant design is acceptable while considering the risk of building damage induced by deep excavations.

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