Research on the Structural Rigidity Characteristics of a Reconfigurable TBM Thrust Mechanism

To improve the adaptability of TBMs in diverse geological environments, this paper proposes a reconfigurable Type-V thrust mechanism (V-TM) with rearrangeable working states, in which structural stiffness can be automatically altered during operation. Therefore, millions of configurations can be obtained, and thousands of instances of working status per configuration can be set respectively. Nonetheless, the complexity of configurations and...