Opening the excavation chamber of the large-diameter size slurry shield: A case study in Nanjing Yangtze River Tunnel in China

•The process of opening the chamber in Nanjing Yangtze River Tunnel was introduced.•The excavation chamber was accessed under air pressure safely.•The air pressure can counteract part of the effective earth pressure via a filter cake.•A dense filter cake can be formed by two procedures in the project.•The air tightness of the filter cake was studied in the laboratory. Shield tunnel construction in a dense strata often encounters malfunction of shield-tunneling machine or abrasion of cutters. Accessing to an excavation chamber under compressed air is a main method to repair and replace worn cutters. And many safety issues such as stability of the excavation face were involved. However, the face stability due to opening an excavation chamber was not fully studied. To overcome this shortcoming, face support scheme and stability analysis were presented in a case history of opening the pressure chamber for a large-diameter (up to 14.93m) slurry shield tunnel constructed underneath Nanjing Yangtze River. Since most of the damaged cutters were distributed along the edge of cutting wheel, only top 3m of tunnel face within the chamber needed to be supported by compressed air, and remaining area would also to be supported by slurry pressure. A series of simple primary laboratory tests were carried out to design an optimum slurries mixing scheme to support the tunnel face as accessing to the pressure chamber in the project. The face stability was analyzed in terms of the pressure equilibrium (i.e., internal and external pressures) as well as three-dimensional numerical analysis by adopting properties of soils and filter cakes from laboratory tests. By injecting lower density slurry into the sand to form a stable infiltration zone, followed by using higher density slurry to create a filter cake at tunnel face, compressed air-support system could ensure face stability during maintenance of cutter wheel. The success of applying the mixed slurry and compressed air-support scheme in this project is valuable to shield tunnel constructions in similar ground conditions.