Control model of earth pressure balance for shield tunneling

Based on some assumptions such as stable driving without disturbance to static earth pressure, the mathematical model with four main tunneling parameters of thrust force, thrust speed, earth pressure in soil room and the speed of screw conveyor was established. Adopting the adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system, a earth pressure balance (EPB) control model with the real-time measured data of earth pressure, thrust force and thrust speed as three inputs, and the speed of screw conveyor as output was designed by means of Matlab software. Model training and parameter optimization were completed with a set of field application data to develop this discharge control based EPB control system which was later tested feasible. The relationships of driving parameters predicted by the control model also verify its practicability. All simulation results show that ANFIS is effective to deal with such nonlinear problem as shield driving, and the EPB control based on ANFIS is a promising method to address the issue encountered in EPB shield tunneling.