Evaluation method and application for cutter wear of large-diameter shield in composite stratum: A case study

As a crucial equipment for cutting through hard rock in a shield machine, wear of disc cutter is inevitable in tunnel construction. Excessive wear can lead to reduced tunneling performance and increased construction risks. Therefore, a method to evaluate disc cutter wear in real time is necessitated for on-site construction. This study proposed an index named equivalent wear, which can mitigate the influence of installation radii on disc cutter wear and evaluate the wear condition of the cutterhead. By integrating with tunneling parameters, the wear of the cutterhead can be evaluated in real time. The method was applied to a tunnel engineering project in China to validate its practicability. Firstly, the relationship between the equivalent wear and the tunneling parameters is investigated. The change of the cutterhead wear condition in different tunneling intervals is recorded, which proves that the evaluation of cutter wear by this method can reflect the condition of cutterhead in real time. In addition, the equivalent wear was used to investigate the change of percentage wear in different area of the cutterhead during different tunneling intervals, as well as the wear condition of replaced and unreplaced disc cutters. The research results show that the method proposed in this paper is practicable. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd