Abstract: The shield machine is a kind of heavy equipment used in underground construction. It is very complicated and has high economic value. Because of the terrible construction environment, it is very difficult to do research of the shield machine excavation in the field. As to that, it is economical and secure to do these research under laboratory condition via a shield machine thrust simulator test rig. The shield machine suffers a complex load, that the simulator test rig is required to simulate the environment loads occurring in the excavating process, to study the mechanical problems. According to the characters of environment loads, we propose a multi-dimension loading mechanism based on the parallel cable-driven principle and do the analysis of the loading simulating ability as well as carry out the loading simulation experiments by utilizing the test rig. The theory and experiments researches discover that the loading simulator test rig can form equivalent thrust force, yawing torque, pitching torque and rolling torque by adjusting the distributing forces on the cutting head and it is feasible to simulate the environment loads.

Key words: loading simulation, loading space, multiple loading, shield machine, simulator test rig