Abstract: A real-time evaluation robot for soil conditioning effect is investigated to realize dynamic monitoring of the soil conditioning effect of the earth-pressure balance shield. As the only part of the robot that is in contact with the muck, the shape of the stirring probe is of great importance to the sensitivity of the mixing torque and penetration resistance detection. In this study, the shield′s muck is assumed to be the Bingham fluid, and the orthogonal simulation experiments are conducted to observe the resistance changes when mixing probe penetration and the torque, where the soil is mixed under different rheological parameters. Therefore, based on the simulation results, the selection analysis of the mixing probe is conducted using the analytic hierarchy process method to obtain a mixing probe that could consider both penetration resistance and detection sensitivity requirements of mixing torque. Finally, the selection results are verified by laboratory tests.

Key words: earthpressure balance shield, soil conditioning evaluation robot, mixing probe, smoothed particle hydrodynamics method, Bingham fluid