Rock-mechanics investigation

The young field of rock mechanics was beginning, early in the 1970s, to develop a rational basis of design for projects in rock; much is already developed for projects in soil by the older field of soil mechanics. Initially, the discipline had been stimulated by such complex projects as arch dams and underground chambers and then increasingly with similar problems with tunnels, rock slopes, and building foundations. In treating the rock mass with its defects as an engineering material, the science of rock mechanics utilizes numerous techniques such as theoretical analysis, laboratory testing, field testing on-site, and instrumentation to monitor performance during construction and operation. Since rock mechanics is a discipline in itself, only the most common field tests are briefly outlined below to give some concept of its role in design, particularly for a rock-chamber project.

Geostress, which can be a significant factor in choice of chamber orientation, shape, and support design, is usually determined in exploratory drifts. Two methods are common, although each is still in the development stage. One is an “overcoring” method (developed in Sweden and South Africa) used for ranges up to about 100 feet out from the drift and employing a cylindrical instrument known as a borehole deformeter. A small hole is drilled into the rock and the deformeter inserted. Diameter changes of the borehole are measured and recorded by the deformeter as the geostress is relieved by overcoring (cutting a circular core around the small hole) with a six-inch bit. Measurements at several depths in at least three borings at different orientations furnish the data needed for computing the existing geostress. When measurement is desired only at the surface of the drift, the so-called French flat-jack method is preferred. In this, a slot is cut at the surface, and its closure is measured as the geostress is relieved by the slot. Next, a flat hydraulic jack is inserted in the rock. The jack pressure necessary to restore closure of the slot (to the condition before its cutting) is considered to equal the original geostress. As these methods require a long drift or shaft for access to the area of measurement, development is under way (particularly in the United States) to extend the range of depth to a few thousand feet. Such will aid in comparing geostress at alternate sites and hopefully avoid locations with high geostress, which has proved very troublesome in several past chamber projects.

Shear strength of a joint, fault, or other rock defect is a controlling factor in appraising strength of the rock mass in terms of its resistance to sliding along the defect. Although partly determinable in the laboratory, it is best investigated in the field by a direct shear test at the work site. While this test has long been used for soil and soft rock, its adaptation to hard rock is due largely to work performed in Portugal. Shear strength is important in all problems of sliding; at Morrow Point Dam, in Colorado, for example, a large rock wedge between two faults started to move into the underground powerhouse and was stabilized by large tendons anchored back in a drainage tunnel plus strut action provided by the concrete structure that supported the generator machinery. The modulus of deformation (that is, the stiffness of the rock) is significant in problems involving movement under stress and in sharing of load between rock and structure, as in a tunnel lining, embedded steel penstock, or foundation of a dam or heavy building. The simplest field test is the plate-jacking method, in which the rock in a test drift is loaded by hydraulic jacks acting on a plate two to three feet in diameter. Larger areas can be tested either by radially loading the internal surface of a test tunnel or by pressurizing a membrane-lined chamber.

Analysis methods in rock mechanics have helped in appraising stress conditions around openings—as at Churchill Falls—to identify and then correct zones of tension and stress concentration. Related work with rock block models is contributing to understanding the failure mechanism of the rock mass, notable work being under way in Austria, Yugoslavia, and the United States.

Chamber excavation and support

Excavation for rock chambers generally starts with a horizontal tunnel at the top of the area to be excavated and progresses down in steps. Rock is excavated by drilling and blasting, carried on simultaneously in several headings. This procedure may give way, however, as moles gain in their ability to cut hard rock economically and as a rock saw or other device is developed for squaring up the circular surface normally cut by the mole. High geostress can be a real problem (causing inward movement of the chamber walls) unless handled by a careful sequence of partial excavations designed to relieve it gradually.

Many of the earlier underground hydroplants were roofed with a concrete arch, often designed for a major load, as in some Italian projects in weak rocks or where blast damage was considerable, as at a few projects in Scotland. Since about 1960, however, most have relied solely on rock bolts for support (sometimes supplemented with shotcrete). That such a light support has been widely successful can be attributed to careful investigation resulting in locations with strong rock, employment of techniques to relieve high geostress, and controlled blasting to preserve rock strength.

Sound-wall blasting

Sound-wall blasting is a technique, primarily developed in Sweden, that preserves the finished rock surfaces in sound condition by careful design of the blasting charges to fit the rock conditions. In underground work, Swedish practice has often produced remarkable results almost like rock sculpturing in which the excellent shaping and preservation of the rock surfaces often permit omitting concrete lining at savings greater than the extra cost of the engineered blasting. While Swedish success is due partly to the generally strong rock in that country, it is due even more to energetic research and development programs to develop (1) theoretical methods for blasting design plus field blast tests to determine pertinent rock properties, (2) special explosives for different rock conditions, and (3) institutes for the training of specialized blasting engineers to apply these procedures in the field construction.

In the United States, sound-wall blasting has enjoyed only indifferent success underground. Reluctance of the blasting industry to change from its customary empirical approach and the lack of specialized blasting engineers trained in Swedish practices have led to a return to the more costly technique of mining an initial pilot bore to afford stress relief, followed by blasting successively thinner slabs toward the free face of the pilot bore.

For excavation from the ground surface, the requirements of sound-wall blasting largely have been met by the technique of presplitting, developed in the United States in the late 1950s. Basically, this technique consists of creating a continuous crack (or presplit) at a desired finished excavation line by initially firing a line of closely spaced, lightly loaded holes drilled there. Next, the interior rock mass is drilled and blasted by conventional means. If a high horizontal geostress is present, it is important that it first be relieved (as by an initial cut a modest distance from the presplit line); otherwise, the presplit crack is not likely to occur in the direction desired. Stockton Dam, in Missouri, illustrates the benefit of presplitting. Here, vertical faces in dolomite up to 110 feet were successfully presplit and promptly rock-bolted; this permitted a major reduction in thickness of the concrete facing, resulting in a net saving of about $2.5 million.

Shaft sinking and drilling

Mining downward, generally from the surface, although occasionally from an underground chamber, is called shaft sinking. In soil, shallow shafts are frequently supported with interlocking steel sheetpiling held by ring beams (circular rib sets); or a concrete caisson may be built on the surface and sunk by excavating inside as weight is added by extending its walls. More recently, large-diameter shallow shafts have been constructed by the “slurry trench method,” in which a circular trench is excavated while filled with a heavy liquid (usually bentonite slurry), which supports its walls until it is finally displaced by filling the trench with concrete. For greater depth in soil, another method involves freezing a ring of soil around the shaft. In this method, a ring of closely spaced freezing holes is drilled outside the shaft. A refrigerated brine is circulated in double-wall pipes in the holes to freeze the soil before starting the shaft excavation. It is then kept frozen until the shaft is completed and lined with concrete. This freezing method was developed in Germany and the Netherlands, where it was used successfully to sink shafts through nearly 2,000 feet of alluvial soil to reach coal beds in the underlying rock. It has also been applied under similar conditions in Britain, Poland, and Belgium. Occasionally, the freezing technique has been used in soft rock to solidify a deep aquifer (layer of water-bearing rock). Because of the long time required for drilling the freezing holes and for freezing the ground (18 to 24 months for some deep shafts), the freezing method has not been popular on public-works projects except as a last resort, although it has been used in New York City for shallow shafts through soil to gain access for deep-water tunnels.

More efficient methods for sinking deep shafts in rock were developed in South African gold-mining operations, in which shafts 5,000 to 8,000 feet deep are common and are generally 20 to 30 feet in diameter. South African procedure has produced progress of about 30 feet per day by utilizing a sinking stage of multiple platforms, which permits concurrent excavation and concrete lining. Excavation is by drilling and blasting with muck loaded into large buckets, with larger shafts operating four buckets alternately in hoisting wells extending through the platforms. Grouting is carried a few hundred feet ahead to seal out water. Best progress is achieved when the rock is pregrouted from two or three holes drilled from the surface before the shaft is started. Since the shallower shafts on public-works projects cannot justify the investment in the large plant needed to operate a sinking stage, their progress in rock is much slower—in the range of 5 to 10 feet per day.

Occasionally, shafts have been sunk through soil by drilling methods. The technique was first used in British practice in 1930 and was subsequently further refined in the Netherlands and Germany. The procedure involves first advancing a pilot hole, then reaming in several stages of enlargement to final diameter, while the walls of the hole are supported by a heavy liquid (called drilling mud), with circulation of the mud serving to remove the cuttings. Then a double-wall steel casing is sunk by displacing the drilling mud, followed by injecting concrete outside the casing and within the annular space between its double walls. One use of this technique was in the 25-foot-diameter Statemine shaft in the Netherlands, 1,500 feet deep through soil that required about three and one-half years before completion in 1959. For the 1962 construction of some 200 missile shafts in Wyoming in soft rock (clay shale and friable sandstone), a giant auger proved effective for sinking these 65-foot-deep, 15-foot-diameter shafts, generally at the rate of two to three days per shaft. Perhaps the largest drilled shaft is one in the Soviet Union: 2,674 feet deep, which was enlarged in four stages of reaming to a final diameter of 28.7 feet, progressing at a reported rate of 15 feet per day.

More dramatic has been the adaptation in the United States of oil-well-drilling methods in a technique called big-hole drilling, used for constructing small shafts in the diameter range of three to six feet. Big-hole drilling was developed for deep emplacement in underground testing of nuclear devices, with more than 150 such big holes drilled in the 1960s up to 5,000 feet deep in Nevada in rocks ranging from soft tuff to granite. In big-hole drilling the hole is made in one pass only with an array of roller-bit cutters that are pressed against the rock by the weight of an assembly of lead-filled drill collars, sometimes totaling 300,000 pounds. The drill rig must be huge in size to handle such loads. The greatest impediment controlling progress has been the removal of drill cuttings, where an air lift is showing promise.

Shaft raising

Handling cuttings is simplified when the shaft can be raised from an existing tunnel, since the cuttings then merely fall to the tunnel, where they are easily loaded into mine cars or trucks. This advantage has long been recognized in mining; where once an initial shaft has been sunk to provide access to and an opportunity for horizontal tunnels, most subsequent shafts are then raised from these tunnels, often by upward mining with men working from a cage hung from a cable through a small pilot hole drilled downward from above. In 1957 this procedure was improved by Swedish development of the raise climber, whose working cage climbs a rail fastened to the shaft wall and extends backward into the horizontal access tunnel into which the cage is retracted during a blast. Simultaneously in the 1950s Germans began experimenting with several mechanized reamers, including a motor-cutter unit pulled upward by a cable in a previously down-drilled pilot hole. A more significant step toward mechanized shaft raising occurred in 1962 when American mole manufacturers developed a device called a raise borer, in which the cutting head is rotated and pulled upward by a drill shaft in a down-drilled pilot hole, with the power unit being located at top of the pilot hole. The capacity of this type of borer (or upward reamer) generally ranges from 3–8-foot diameters in lifts up to 1,000 feet with progress ranging up to 300 feet per day. Furthermore, available cutters when operating on raise borers can cut through rock often almost twice as hard as rock moles can deal with. For larger shafts, bigger-diameter reamers may be operated in an inverted position to ream downward, with the cuttings sluiced to the access tunnel below. A 12-foot-diameter, 1,600-foot-deep vent shaft was completed by this method in 1969 at the White Pine Copper Mine in Michigan. Starting from a 10-inch pilot hole, it was enlarged in three downreaming passes.

The introduction of a workable raise borer in the 1960s represented a breakthrough in shaft construction, cutting construction time to one-third and cost to less than one-half that for an upward-mined shaft. At the beginning of the 1970s, the procedure was being widely adopted for shaft raising, and some projects had been specifically designed to take advantage of this more efficient method. At a Northfield Mountain (Massachusetts) underground hydroplant (completed in 1971), the previously common large surge chamber was replaced by a series of horizontal tunnels at three levels, connected by vertical shafts. This layout permitted significant economy by the use of jumbos already available from other tunnels of the project and the use of a raise borer for starting the shafts. If very large shafts are involved, the raise borer is particularly useful in simplifying the so-called glory-hole method, in which the main shaft is sunk by blasting; the muck is then dumped in the central glory hole, previously constructed by a raise borer. The example is based on the construction of a 133-foot-diameter surge shaft above the Angeles penstock tunnel near Los Angeles. The glory-hole technique was also used in 1944 in constructing a series of 20 underground fuel-oil chambers in Hawaii, working from access tunnels driven initially at both top and bottom of the chambers and later used to house oil and vent piping. The advent of the raise borer should now make this and similar construction more economically attractive. Recently, some deep sewer projects have been redesigned to utilize the raise borer for shaft connections.

Development of method

The immersed-tube, or sunken-tube, method, used principally for underwater crossings, involves prefabricating long tube sections, floating them to the site, sinking each in a previously dredged trench, and then covering with backfill. While more correctly classified as a subaqueous adaptation of the dry-land cut-and-cover procedure often used for subways, the immersed-tube method warrants inclusion as a tunneling technique because it is becoming a preferred alternate to the older method of constructing a subaqueous tunnel under compressed air with a Greathead shield. A major advantage is that, once the new section has been connected, interior work is conducted in free air, thus avoiding the high cost and major risk of operating a large shield under high air pressure. Furthermore, the immersed-tube method is usable in water deeper than is possible with the shield method, which essentially is restricted to less than 100 feet of water by the maximum air pressure at which workers can safely work.

The procedure was first developed by an American engineer, W.J. Wilgus, for the construction (1906–10) of the Detroit River twin-tube railroad tunnel between Detroit, Mich., and Windsor, Ont., where it was successfully used for the 2,665-foot river-crossing portion. A structural assembly of steel tubes was prefabricated in 262-foot-long sections with both ends temporarily bulkheaded or closed. Each section was then towed out and sunk in 60 to 80 feet of water, onto a grillage of I-beams in sand at the bottom of a trench previously dredged in the river-bottom clay. After being connected to the previous section by locking pins driven by a diver, the section was weighted down by surrounding it with concrete. Next, after removal of the temporary bulkheads at the just-completed connection, the newly placed section was pumped out, permitting completion of an interior concrete lining in free air. With subsequent refinements these basic principles still form the basis of the immersed-tube method.

After use on a four-tube New York City subway crossing under the Harlem River in 1912–14, the method was tried for a vehicular tunnel in the 1925–28 construction of the 3,545-foot-long, 37-foot-diameter Posey tunnel at Oakland in California. Because these and other experiences have indicated that the problems encountered in building large vehicular tunnels could be better handled by the immersed-tube method, it has been preferred for subaqueous vehicular tunnels since about 1940. While shield tunneling continued in a transition period (1940–50), subsequently nearly all of the world’s large vehicular tunnels have been constructed by the immersed-tube method, including such notable examples as the Bankhead tunnel at Mobile, Ala.; two Chesapeake Bay tunnels; the Fraser River tunnel at Vancouver, B.C.; the Maas River tunnel in the Netherlands; Denmark’s Limfjord tunnel; Sweden’s Tingstad tunnel; and the Hong Kong Cross Harbor tunnel.

Modern practice

The world’s longest and deepest application to date is the twin-tube subway crossing of San Francisco Bay, constructed between 1966 and 1971 with a length of 3.6 miles in a maximum water depth of 135 feet. The 330-foot-long, 48-foot-wide sections were constructed of steel plate and launched by shipbuilding procedures. Each section also had temporary end bulkheads and upper pockets for gravel ballast placed during sinking. After placement of the interior concrete lining at a fitting-out dock, each section was towed to the site and sunk in a trench previously dredged in the mud in the bottom of the bay. With diver guidance, the initial connection was accomplished by hydraulic-jack-powered couplers, similar to those that automatically join railroad cars. By relieving the water pressure within the short compartment between bulkheads at the new joint, the water pressure acting on the forward end of the new section provided a huge force that pushed it into intimate contact with the previously laid tube, compressing the rubber gaskets to provide a watertight seal. Following this, the temporary bulkheads were removed on each side of the new joint and interior concrete placed across the connection.

Most applications of the immersed-tube procedure outside the United States have been by a Danish engineer-constructor firm, Christiani and Nielsen, starting in 1938 with a three-tube highway crossing of the Maas River in Rotterdam. While following American technique in essence, European engineers have developed a number of innovations, including prestressed concrete in lieu of a steel structure (often consisting of a number of short sections tied together with prestressed tendons to form a single section 300 feet in length); the use of butyl rubber as the waterproofing membrane; and initial support on temporary piles while a sand fill is jetted beneath. An alternate to the last approach has been used in a Swedish experiment on the Tingstad tunnel, in which the precast sections were supported on water-filled nylon sacks and the water later replaced by grout injected into the sacks to form the permanent support. Also, the cross section has been greatly enlarged—the 1969 Schelde River tunnel in Antwerp, Belg., used precast sections 328 feet long by 33 feet high by 157 feet wide. This unusually large width accommodates two highway tubes of three lanes each, one two-track railroad tube, and one bicycle tube. Particularly unusual was a 1963 use of the immersed-tube technique in subway construction in Rotterdam. Trenches were dug or, in some cases, made out of abandoned canals and filled with water. The tube sections were then floated into position. This technique had been first tried in 1952 for a land approach to the immersed-tube Elizabeth tunnel in Norfolk, Va.; in low-elevation ground with the water table near the surface, it permits a considerable saving in bracing of the trench because keeping the trench filled eliminates the need for resisting external water pressure.

Thus, the immersed-tube method has become a frequent choice for subaqueous crossings, although some locations pose problems of interference with intensive navigation traffic or the possibility of displacement by severe storms (one tube section of the Chesapeake Bay tunnel was moved out of its trench by a severe storm during construction). The method is being actively considered for many of the world’s most difficult underwater crossings, including the long-discussed English Channel Project.