Dynamic response of a piecewise circular tunnel embedded in a poroelastic medium

Recently, considerable efforts have been devoted to evaluation of seismic dynamic response of a circular tunnel. Conventional approaches have considered integral liners embedded in an elastic medium. In this study, we re-examine the problem with piecewise liners embedded in a porous medium. Surrounding saturated porous medium of tunnels is described by Biot's poroelastic theory, while the liner pieces and the connecting joints are treated as curved beams and characterized by curved beam theories. The scattered wave field in the porous medium is obtained by the wave function expansion method. The differential equations governing the vibration of a curved beam is discretized by the General Differential Quadrature (GDQ) method. The domain decomposition method is used to establish the global discrete dynamic equations for the piecewise tunnel. The surrounding soil and the tunnel are coupled together via the stress and the displacement continuation conditions which are implemented by the boundary collocation method. Numerical results demonstrate that the stiffness difference between the liner piece and the connecting joints has a considerable influence on the internal forces of the liner piece.