Method to avoid the structural interference of the thrust system of a shield tunneling machine

Several malfunctions of the shield tunneling machine (STM) caused by structural interference have been encountered in actual tunnel excavation. This paper is focusing on providing an effective method to avoid the structural interference based on making the reachable and the required workspaces of the thrust system match each other. The main structure of the thrust mechanism is analyzed, and coordinate systems are built up to describe the pose and workspace of the thrust mechanism. Constraint conditions are derived and the formulation of each constraint condition is carried out to facilitate the analysis of the reachable workspace of the thrust mechanism. Meanwhile, a reachable workspace determination algorithm is introduced based on interval analysis method. The mathematical model for determining the required workspace of the thrust mechanism is presented based on the analysis of the process when the STM excavates along a specific tunnel axis. Two applications are included to show how to avoid these problems by choosing reasonable parameters of the designed tunnel axis and the key structural parameters of the thrust mechanism based on workspace matching.