Dr Benoît Jones of Inbye Engineering Limited in the UK has written a textbook titled ‘Soft Ground Tunnel Design’. It was released on 11th November 2021 by CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group. It is available as an e-book or in print from: https://www.routledge.com/Soft-Ground-Tunnel-Design/Jones/p/book/9781482254679
It is the first ever comprehensive textbook on soft ground tunnel design. The target audience is MSc students, graduate engineers and experienced engineers new to soft ground tunnelling, but even for experienced tunnel design experts there will be things that are new or interesting and for whom it will be a useful reference work, compilation of methods and summary of the state of the art.
Each chapter begins with an introduction that sets out the learning points, i.e. what the reader will understand and will be able to do after reading the chapter. Throughout the book there are numerous worked examples that go through the calculation steps, and problems at the end of each chapter for practising and consolidating learning.
The three principal themes are stability, prediction of ground movements, and structural design of the tunnel lining. These themes are the key to understanding how tunnels work and are the basis for choices of construction method and lining type. The reader is guided through the basic principles of soil-structure interaction, the three-dimensional effects of construction sequence and the effects of construction on other structures, in steps of gradually increasing complexity from basic principles to sophisticated design. As the calculations become more complex, it is more and more important that they remain grounded in an in-depth understanding of how real tunnels behave. For this reason, the very first chapter starts with case studies of real tunnel behaviour, to provide a conceptual framework of what happens to the tunnel lining and what goes on in the ground around a tunnel in terms of displacements, stresses and strains.
The book also clearly presents all the most commonly used design methods, deriving them step-by-step from first principles. In the original papers there are often missing steps in the derivations, missing information, implicit assumptions that are not explained, and even errors. It is alarming to consider how often these errors have been inherited, used and disseminated over the years. In this book they are set out transparently and correctly in a way that is easy to follow.
Dr Benoît Jones has worked as a designer, researcher, contractor, academic, teacher, inventor and consultant. He is a Chartered Civil Engineer and is the Managing Director of Inbye Engineering, a technology and consulting company he established in 2014. He has authored more than 60 articles and papers. He has won the ICE Telford Premium Prize for outstanding contribution to the civil engineering lecture, as well as two NCE Tunnelling Awards, an ITA Austria Innovation Prize and an ITA Award.
From 2011 to 2014 Benoît set up and ran the MSc in Tunnelling and Underground Space at the University of Warwick. In doing so, he found there was no comprehensive textbook available on soft ground tunnel design, so he had to synthesis the literature and his own experience to find the best ways to present this subject to his students. Over the last few years, those teaching materials have been developed and enhanced into this book.
Comments: