Extremely large deformation of tunnel induced by rock mass fracture using GPGPU parallel FDEM.

It is essential to better understand the large deformation behavior of deep tunnels in weak rock mass to improve the long‐term stability of tunnel surrounding rock mass and design effective supports for squeezing tunnels. This paper introduces two representative large deformation engineering examples to study squeezing behavior. First, new algorithms of contact search, determination of actual contact, and calculation law of contact pairs are proposed for general‐purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs), by improving the original serial algorithms and developing a compute unified device architecture (CUDA) parallel program, to satisfy the large‐scale rock fracture process simulation. Then, tunnels excavation and rock reinforcement effect including the combination of U‐shaped steel and steel fabric, spray concrete (SMC), and grouting were modeled. The verification, done by comparing the field observation data and the FDEM simulation results of progressive fracture and the tunnel wall convergence displacement, shows that stress remarkable rebalancing after excavation because of high in situ stress, low rock mass strength, and rock mass long‐term strength reduction properties, thus, the rock mass fracture progressively and the rock blocks move continuously, leading to the rock mass volume increase significantly. The result demonstrates one of the root causes of squeezing. To effectively reduce the tunnel wall displacement and maintain tunnel stability, support with higher stiffness or multifactorial combined support methods and grouting with a better bonding effect should be used together. The findings provide insights into the progress of tunnel squeezing and the basis for support design in the squeezing tunnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]