Abstract: Objective: Based on the shield tunnel project of Nanjing Heyan Road rivercrossing channel, the problem of tearing cutter severe wear in sandy stratum is studied, and the methods suitable for predicting tearing cutter wear amount in sandy stratum are explored. Method: The wear of shield tunneling tearing cutter in sandy stratum is measured onsite, and the cutter wear amount of different cutter changing intervals is analyzed. EF (empirical formula) method is applied to fit the wear amount of tearing cutters in the entire sandy stratum, and tearing cutter wear coefficients of different cutter radii are derived reversely from the fieldmeasured wear amount. BP (backpropagation) neural network method is applied to fit the tearing cutter wear amount. The application conditions suitable for EF method and BP neural network method are compared. Result & Conclusion: The wear coefficients of full head tearing cutter in fine sand stratum is 1.48×10-3 mm/km; the wear coefficients of the tearing cutter in lower disc center cutter, front cutter and edge cutter areas when constructing in the fine sandmedium coarse sand stratum are 7.84×10-3 mm/km, 17.88×10-3 mm/km and 28.64×10-3 mm/km, respectively; the BP neural network is applied to fit the wear law of tearing cutter in sandy stratum，and the results are adequate with goodness of fit greater than 0.95 and error rate of 20.7%. EF method is recommended for tearing cutter wear prediction in sandy stratum, but when the prediction performance of the EF method is poor in other strata, the BP neural network method can be employed.