Fractional Viscoelastic Analysis of Transversely Isotropic Surrounding Rock Along Shallow Buried Elliptical Tunnel

This study introduces the fractional order Merchant model to analytically solve the stress and displacement fields of the transversely isotropic viscoelastic surrounding rock along shallow elliptical tunnels. First, the stress and displacement solutions of fractional order viscoelastic and transversely isotropic half planes under arbitrary loads are obtained using the Laplace transform and the elastic‐viscoelastic correspondence principle. Second, based on the above half plane solution and the solution of the deep buried elliptical tunnel problem, the Schwarz alternating method is introduced to obtain the analytical solution of the shallow buried elliptical tunnel. A MATLAB program is developed, and the accuracy of the theory and program in this study is verified by comparing it with the results of ABAQUS. Finally, the effects of transversely isotropic parameters, tunnel burial depth, and viscoelastic parameters on the stress and displacement of tunnel surrounding rock are analyzed.