Adaptability of a Reinforced Concrete Diaphragm Wall Cut by Disc Cutter

On the background of a subway project in Suzhou City of Jiangsu Province and targeting the engineering difficulty of disc cutters cutting reinforced concrete walls, this paper illustrates the adaptability of a reinforced concrete diaphragm wall cut by disc cutter through conducting related laboratory tests and numerical simulations. When cutting a reinforced concrete diaphragm wall, the cutter should use the low-penetration depth excavation pattern with the depth of the penetration kept within 10 mm/r. In order to keep the torque in a small floating range, the cutterhead driving speed and thrust should be strictly controlled during the cutting period. Three types of fracture surface after the cutting operation, namely, single-side rolling destroy, double-sided rolling destroy, and brittle destroy. The percentage of the length of the cut steel bar smaller than 60 cm can reach 44.2% when the driving parameters of the disc cutter are well regulated. The simulation results show that the deeper the penetration, the more unstable the cutting load. The relationship between the normal force of the disc cutter and the penetration depth was linear, and the trend of the simulated value was comparable with the experimental one, which ensures the rationality of this pattern. The cutter spacing had little impact on the cutting results when it was wider than 80 mm.