Vibration of a Cylindrical Tunnel under a Centric Point-Source Explosion

Underground tunnels are vulnerable to terrorists’ bombing attacks, which calls for studies on tunnel’s response to internal explosive loading. In this paper, the dynamic response of a cylindrical tunnel to an ideal centric point explosion was treated as an axisymmetric 2-dimensional problem, in which the tunnel was modeled with a continuous anisotropic shell, while the ground medium’s effect was accounted for with linear elastic Winkler springs and the explosive loading described by a temporal and spatial function. The governing equation of the motion is a fourth-order partial differential equation, for which a numerical method combining finite difference with the implicit Newmark-β method was adopted. This method avoided complicated integral transform and numerical inverse transformation, thus allowing efficient parameter study. The maximum radial displacement was found on the cricle of the center of explosive, where hoop stress is the maximum principal stress. The anisotropy showed little influence on maximum hoop stress. Within the range of ground medium’s modulus, minor influence on maximum hoop stress was incurred. This research may be helpful to hazard assessment and protective design for some critical subway tunnels.

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