Tunnel and Underground SpaceISSN:1225-1275(Print) 2287-1748(Online)한국암반공학회

Avoiding a fault zone would be a best practice for safety in underground construction, which is only sometimes possible because of many restrictions and other field conditions. For instance, there is an ongoing conception of Korea-Japan subsea tunnels that inevitably cross a massive fault system in the Korea Strait. Therefore it was deemed necessary to find an efficient way of predicting the likely behaviour of underground structures under fault slip. This paper presents the findings from simple numerical analysis for investigating the stress induced at a normal fault with a dip of 45 degrees. We used a boundary element software that assumed constant displacement discontinuity, which allowed the displacement to be estimated separately at both the fault's hangingwall and footwall sides. The results suggested that a principal stress rotation of 45 degrees occurred at the edges of the fault during the slip, which was in agreement with the phenomenon for fault plane suggested in the body of literature. A simple numerical procedure presented in this paper could be adopted to investigate other fault-related issues associated with underground structure construction.