Abstract: The cutters’ layout should meet the requirements that the cutters should distribute uniformly, desperately and symmetrically, that the cutterhead should be splitted properly and the muck buckets can discharge rock muck smoothly, and that the cutterhead’s deformation and stress should be as small as possible under the overall force balance status. In order to overcome the drawback that the typical layout pattern usually cannot meet all the requirements above, a cutter layout optimization method based on the grey relational analysis is proposed. The original layout schemes are established by grouping the cutters and exerting micro-adjustments for the cutters’ polar angles. The original layout schemes are selected by the non-interference rule, and then calculated in the grey relational analysis method with the evaluation indexes of the cutterhead’s eccentric force, the cutterhead’s overturning moment and the eccentricity of the cutters’ centroid, to get the optimal layout. An integral cutterhead with the cutters’ multi-spiral layout pattern, and an assembled cutterhead with the cutters’ stochastic layout pattern are introduced to be optimized. The evaluation indexes of the integral cutterhead reduce by 48%, 99%, 57% and those of the assembled cutterhead reduce by 22%, 59%, 55%, which proves the feasible and effectiveness of the optimization method. Comparing the cutterhead’s stress analysis results before and after optimization, no significant changes of the deformation and stress distribution are found, which illustrates that no harm is done to the stiffness of the cutterhead after the cutters’ layout optimization.

Key words: cutter layout optimization, full-face rock tunnel boring machine, grey relational analysis