2025.09

Beijing University of Technology — Du Xiuli

Flourishing Underground Development

The development and utilization of underground space is an important direction for urban construction and is of great significance for expanding urban space and achieving intensive urban development. Internationally, infrastructure projects such as transportation, commerce, municipal services, and warehousing have been widely built underground, greatly expanding the functional space of cities and improving operational efficiency. China is currently in a period of rapid development of urban underground engineering construction, and both the scale and speed of construction and planned construction rank first in the world. Taking subway construction as an example, as of June 2024, 41 cities in mainland China had completed subway lines, with an operating mileage of 8,689.51 km. Among them, Shanghai and Beijing ranked first and second among global cities with 795.37 km and 760.79 km of subway lines, respectively, and structural forms are showing large-scale and complex characteristics.

Awakening to Underground Seismic Resistance

For a long time, the engineering and academic communities believed that the seismic safety performance of underground structures was higher than that of above-ground structures. Therefore, for a considerable period, seismic research on underground structures did not receive sufficient attention. Even countries with relatively advanced structural seismic technology, such as the United States and Japan, did not consider seismic design requirements for most underground structures, resulting in a lack of research results on seismic analysis theories and design methods. In recent decades, there have been many instances worldwide in which strong earthquakes caused seismic damage to underground structures. In particular, during the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake in Japan, a large area of subway underground structures suffered earthquake damage, and there was even a case in which the Daikai Subway Station completely collapsed, which attracted the attention of earthquake engineering experts and engineers worldwide to the seismic problem of underground structures. Unlike above-ground structures, the seismic response of underground structures is constrained by the surrounding rock and soil media, and structural inertial force is no longer the main influencing factor. Site deformation under earthquake action and soil-structure dynamic interaction effects have become the main factors affecting the seismic response of underground structures, which brings new problems and challenges to seismic-resistant and seismic-reduction design of structures.

Background and Course of Writing

The author began research on seismic resistance of underground structures in 2000 and has achieved relatively systematic results in aspects such as influencing factors and laws of seismic response of underground structures, simulation models and methods for damage and failure, damage mechanisms and failure modes, performance analysis for seismic evaluation, simplified seismic design methods, design principles and methods for seismic reduction control, and technology and application. As the person in charge of the integrated project of the Major Research Plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, "Dynamic Catastrophe of Major Engineering Projects," the author also promised to complete a book on seismic resistance of underground structures. Therefore, writing of this book began in 2014. After multiple adjustments to the writing outline and several revisions of the manuscript, the draft was completed in early 2017, and funding was obtained from the National Science and Technology Academic Works Publication Fund. Considering some recent work progress, the content was subsequently revised and supplemented several times, and the final manuscript was finalized in 2024.

Overview of the Book's Content

The book consists of 13 chapters, covering an overview of seismic research on underground structures and some related basic theories and analysis methods for seismic-resistant and seismic-reduction design of structures, theories and methods for nonlinear seismic response numerical simulation of soil-underground structure systems, model test methods and techniques for seismic response of soil-underground structure systems, analysis of seismic response characteristics and parameter influences of underground structures, analysis of seismic damage mechanisms and failure modes of underground structures, seismic performance evaluation of underground structures, seismic reduction control of underground structures, simplified analysis methods for seismic design of underground structures, and seismic resistance of prefabricated underground structures. The contents of the chapters are interrelated, connected, and organically integrated. They not only emphasize research on the nonlinear characteristics of site soil media and the effects of soil-structure nonlinear dynamic interaction, but also attach importance to analysis of the seismic mechanical performance of structural components, and also have certain distinctive features in comparative verification research on model tests, numerical simulations, and earthquake damage. In addition, while the book attaches great importance to introducing numerical simulation models and methods for nonlinear seismic response of site soil-underground structure systems, it also attaches great importance to introducing simplified analysis methods for underground structures, with a relatively systematic introduction provided in a separate chapter. To facilitate readers' understanding of systematic knowledge, the contents of Chapters 2 and 3 of this book are condensed from relevant contents in the author's book "Engineering Wave Theory and Methods" (Science Press).

PART .03

About the Author

Professor Du Xiuli, doctoral supervisor, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, earthquake engineering expert, and leader of the civil engineering discipline. He is a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, a "Changjiang Scholar" Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, a leader of an innovative research group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, director of the National Key Laboratory of Bridge Engineering Safety and Resilience, a member of the Technical Committee of the Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China, executive director of the China Civil Engineering Society, executive director of the Seismological Society of China, and a member of the Expert Committee of the China Highway and Transportation Society, among other academic positions. He has been awarded titles such as "National Advanced Worker" and "National Outstanding Scientific and Technological Worker," and the teacher team he leads was selected as a National Huang Danian-style Teacher Team in Universities.

Professor Du Xiuli received his doctorate from the Institute of Engineering Mechanics, China Earthquake Administration in 1990, was exceptionally promoted to professor-level senior engineer in 1996, and transferred to teach at Beijing University of Technology in 2001. For a long time, Professor Du Xiuli has been engaged in frontline teaching and research work and has long been committed to engineering seismic research and engineering practice, making major contributions in the field of coupled seismic resistance of structures-foundations-embedded soil masses.