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Canada Line Transit Tunnels

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Canada Line Transit Tunnels Canada Line Transit Tunnels (Vancouver, BC): ground stability when excavating in Earth Pressure Balance mode; how changes to the conditioning of the excavated soil cope with varying challenges presented by a highly permeable layer. Zdenek Dan Eisenstein, Jeff Hewitt, Andrea Ciamei, Marco Moccichino 1. Summary Glacial till section of the Canada Line TBM tunnels experienced some disruption during the excavation. Unexpected not homogeneous soil conditions and layers of loose high permeable material with hydraulic connectivity have been successfully faced though. TBM was always below water table level with peak of 20 metres head. The control of stability pressure and muck conditioning were key elements of a challenging accomplishment. Specifically, field tests on the spoils and frequent adaptations to the conditioning agents’ mixture allowed regular boring cycles. Pulpy and homogeneous material inside the TBM excavation chamber granted a more uniform distribution of the earth stability pressures. This paper investigates the influence of keeping a proper not permeable muck in respect of the TBM face stability. Analyses show the effects of a homogeneous muck with a coefficient of permeability at least equal to the lowest in situ value. Under such conditions, the possibility of considering the undrained behaviour of the soil is one of the major finding of the present study. Permeability’s influence with non cohesive soil will be studied in further developments. 2. Canada Line: introduction The Canada Line is a 19km long automated light rapid transit system with 16 stations in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The Concession was awarded to InTransitBC to design, build, partially finance, operate, and maintain the system for 35 years. The project must be complete by November 2009 to be ready for the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held in Vancouver and Whistler, BC. The bored tunnel section consists of 2.45km of twin bored tunnel and 3 stations. The station work is limited to the excavations and temporary support necessary to facilitate the bored tunnel works. A joint venture between SNC- Lavalin Constructors Pacific and SELI (SSJV) has recently completed the design and construction of this section. Work for the bored tunnel commenced in November 2005 with shoring and excavation works for the tunnelling operations pit that will become Olympic Village Station and will be completed in the spring of 2008. The tunnels were driven with a 6m diameter Earth Pressure Balance Tunnel Boring Machine (EPBM) and lined with 250mm thick, 5.3m diameter precast concrete segments. Seven hundred and fifty meters of each tunnel were driven through glacial and interglacial deposits of sand, silt, and clay with granitic boulders. The paper discusses the challenges faced in negotiating these soils which contained unforeseen geological conditions. 3. Stretch considered in this study: False Creek – Granville Street The bored tunnels pass under the False Creek and the Downtown area. The first stretch is beneath the residential area at South False Creek (Stamps Landing). Sloping down (5.5%) the alignment reaches its first lower spot roughly in the middle of False Creek, which here spans about 370m. Hence, it commences to rise at 5.5% again, reaching False Creek’s North shore and then smoothly arrives in Yaletown Roundhouse Station (located along Davie street between Pacific Boulevard and Mainland street). The tunnels continue along Davie Street on a northwesterly bearing to sta. 413+250, at which point they curve (minimum radius 200m on inbound drive) right through 90 degrees onto a northeasterly bearing below the centre of Granville Street. Beginning the curve the tunnels rise from the second and deeper lower point 5.5% grade to sta. 424+051.68, just south of Vancouver City Centre Station. Afterwards they remain at relatively shallow depth, with cover varying between one and two tunnel diameters, for the remaining part of the drives. The break through is at the extraction shaft located North crossing between Pender and Granville Street (sta 424+561.51). Figure 1: Canada Line TBM tunnels alignment. Approximately in the middle of the False Creek, the geology changes turning from sandstone into the overlying till (a glacial deposit of silt and sands). The transition is foreseen through a discontinuity having a sub – vertical immersion. Midway through the curve on Brava Towers, the tunnels turn back into sandstone bedrock – the invert first encounters bedrock at sta. 423+435. The Early Tertiary sandstones and siltstones are massive and jointing is poorly developed or absent. The till consists of a clay-silt-sand matrix with gravel and very strong cobbles and boulders up to several meters in diameter. During the Quaternary Period, within the last 1 million years, the Vancouver area was intermittently covered by thick ice of glaciers. At least three major periods of glaciation are believed to have taken place during the Pleistocene Epoch in this region, the earliest (known as the Semiahmoo and Westlynn glaciations) occurring more than 60,000 years ago, and the most recent (known as the Fraser Glaciation) retreating some 11,000 years ago. The ice sculpted the landscape and deposited a variety of glacial and non-glacial sediments. These sediments are expected to be encountered during tunnelling alignment (Downtown and False Creek); they include thick complex units of glacial till and stratified drift deposited beneath, and at the margins of, the ice. 4. Geological situation and geotechnical investigations The geomechanical conditions considered in the analyses correspond to a situation frequently faced while boring the stretch of twin tunnels from False Creek to Granville Street, which was characterized by the presence of significantly continuous layers of high permeability loose till. Evidence of the wide spread and continuity of such a soft inclusion with abundant water recharge was obtained during the drillings for the pile sheet of Yaletown Station. Sonic drillings, vertical profiles of grain size distribution and borehole tests (pressuremeter, SPT and hydraulic conductivity testing) gave further indications about the geotechnical properties and the typical thickness of the soft inclusions, which could thereafter soundly represented as a continuous layer. Where such a layer intersects the core of the tunnel to be excavated, a typical case of mixed face conditions is obtained. Although it is likely that more than a single layer exists, possibly with additional minor inclusions and lenses of limited extent, to keep the model as simple as possible a unique layer was considered. The thickness of the soft layer was fixed equal to 1.5 m, that is D/4 (where D is the tunnel diameter, equal to 6 m), while its position within the face was varied: i.e., four cases were considered, corresponding to a relative elevation z of the base of the layer, with respect to the tunnel axis, of -3, -1.5, 0 and 1.5 m. The set of performed analyses include also two situations of entirely homogeneous soil, i.e., without a soft layer and with a soil mass formed only of soft material, respectively. On the basis of geotechnical parameters estimated from the site report and the investigations carried out during tunnel construction (Table 1), the two materials which compose the calculation model were given the parameters listed in Table 2. The parameters of the till formation represent the average properties of an ideal medium formed by randomly alternated strata of weak and strong till. The material model assumed in the following analyses is the conventional linear elastic perfectly plastic model with Mohr-Coulomb strength criterion. The behaviour of the water-saturated porous medium during excavation advance was represented by a two-phase approach. Only the drained elastic moduli and the drained strength parameters are therefore required, while the undrained behaviour is governed by the water bulk modulus (Kw = 2 GPa), porosity and the skeleton bulk modulus. Table 1: Geomechanical properties of soils from site report and additional investigations Weak, loose Strong till Weak till Silt till Bulk unit weight, γ (kN/m3) 21.5 21.5 Porosity, n (-) 0.3 0.3 Shear modulus, G (MPa) 170 60 Elastic modulus, E’ (MPa) 425 150 65 Cohesion, c’ (kPa) 100 25 30 Friction angle, ϕ’ (°) 40 38 32 Undrained cohesion, cu (kPa) 800 200 Permeability, k (m/s) 10-8, 10-7 10-8, 10-7 10-5 Table 2: Geomechanical properties assumed in the numerical models 1) Typical till 2) Layer of high formation permeability Bulk unit weight, γ (kN/m3) 21.5 21.5 Porosity, n (-) 0.3 0.3 Shear modulus, G (MPa) 120 24 Elastic modulus, E’ (MPa) 300 60 Poisson ratio, ν' (-) 0.25 0.25 Cohesion, c’ (kPa) 20 0 Friction angle, ϕ’ (°) 40 30 Dilation angle, ψ (°) 0 0 Permeability, k (m/s) 10-8 10-5 The initial stress conditions in the soil mass were obtained by assuming a unit weight of the rock mass 3 of γ = 21.5 kN/m and a coefficient of lateral pressure at rest K0=0.5. Pore pressures have a hydrostatic distribution. The tunnel reaches its section of minimum overburden (about 15 m) at the chainage of Yaletown Station, whilst the maximum overburden is (about 30 m) correspond to the under passing of Brava Tower, near the end of the stretch of tunnel to be analyzed. Figure 2, as an example, refer to the situation of minimum overburden. For the same case, the undisturbed water table is at 6 m depth from the ground surface. Figure 2: Typical section of analysis. 5. Problems during excavation and adopted solutions Drive 1 The transition from sandstone to till went smoothly without any geological anomalies becoming apparent. Once the machine was wholly in the till face inspections, under atmospheric pressure, showed the face to be comprised of strong impermeable till. These favourable ground conditions lasted for approximately 300m, to just beyond Yaletown- Roundhouse Station, and regular cutting head inspections and tool changes could be made in normal (atmospheric) conditions.
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