Nowadays, use of pressurized shield tunnel boring machine is often fully justified, especially in urban areas where soils are generally soft, partially or fully saturated, and where the building preservation requires a drastic limitation of volume losses during excavation. This thesis aims to improve understanding of the phenomenology of this method of excavation and to develop new tools to design and pilot tunnel boring machines. First, analysis are conducted from tests on a reduced scale model of earth pressurized balanced shield tunnel boring machine original international. These analysis concern stress strain soil behavior during equilibrium rate tunneling, estimation of face stability and analysis of quantities measured on the tunnel boring machine. Analyses are conducted in homogeneous soils and in stratified soils, two and three-layered, configurations frequently encountered on site. In a second step, analyses made at physical model scale are compared to field data so as to validate physical modeling made. Finally, theoretical modeling of pressurized shield tunneling is studied. On the one hand, capabilities and limitations of analytical (yield design theory) and numerical tools to evaluate face stability are exhibited through confrontations with our experimental data. On the other hand, a numerical procedure to model equilibrium rate tunneling, issued of physical modeling results, is proposed.
