Failure analysis of center cutter mount in shield machine under tuff layer

The shield machine is a giant dedicated engineering machine used for digging the full section of a tunnel. During the railway tunnel construction in Jinan through tuff layer, the fasteners of the center cutter in a large number of EPB shield machines, used in the construction, encountered fracture failure. In this paper, investigating the failure morphology of the failed components in the construction site, the reason of such fracture failure is...