BIM-based model generation and high performance simulation of soil-structure interaction in mechanized tunnelling

Mechanized tunneling is an established construction technology in particular in urban environments, which involves interactions between the tunnel boring machine (TBM), the ring-wise installed linings, the tail void grouting and the surrounding soil including the groundwater as well as existing buildings. Evidently, 3D computational simulations of the machine driven tunnel construction process requires time consuming preparation and excessive computing resources. In this work, a parallelization strategy is applied to perform large scale simulations of the advancement process in mechanized tunneling. To support the generation of realistic simulation models, the Building Information Modeling (BIM) concept is employed. In this approach, different simulation components in terms of geometrical representation, material modeling and process modeling are stored in the database, and can be selected on demand, depending on the objective of the analysis. In the highest modeling level, all components involved in the TBM advancement in urban environments, namely the soil, the tail-void grouting, the segmented lining, and the existing buildings are considered. The parallelization strategy employs the domain decomposition technique to decompose the large model into sub-domains. The contact between the TBM and the soil is resolved by using the surface-to-surface, so called mortar contact formulation. The spatial-temporal system is discretized using an LBB-compatible mixed formulation for space discretization and the generalized-method for temporal discretization, leading to a linear system of block structure. This system is then solved iteratively by Krylov subspace method and a block preconditioner to speed-up the convergence. Selected numerical benchmarks are presented to showcase the effectiveness of the employed parallelization strategy for mechanized tunneling using a BIM concept