Emerging problem for immersed tunnels: fire induced concrete cracking

Published: 14 April, 2010

In the last decade, fire safety of tunnels has become a point of major, international concern. One of the aspects that has recently been studied in this respect is the repairability of immersed tunnels after fire. Concerned about this issue, the Ministry of Transport in the Netherlands commissioned, a couple of years ago, a tentative study into the development of cracks, especially focussing at the unexposed (extrados) side of immersed tunnels, since at those locations repair options are limited.

As an example in this study, the Wijkertunnel near Amsterdam was chosen. The study indicated the development of large and wide cracks, possibly yielding a durability problem on the longer term caused by premature sudden collapse due to reinforcement corrosion. The uncertainties in the study where such that further work was found necessary, with a view to determine the severity of the problem.

To this end, Efectis set out to study more in-depth the concrete cracking issue. This was done with fire tests, using 1:10 scale models of immersed concrete tunnels, along with the development of a finite element computer simulation model, validated on these tests, allowing for predictions of the behaviour on scale 1:1 and a parametric study.

File: 212-223_Emerging problem for immersed tunnels.pdf (1838k)

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