The second TBM drive at the combined road and metro tunnel in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, is set to start while the first NFM Technologies’ slurry machine on the job continues to make steady progress.
China Railway Tunnel Group is excavating the 2.7km long twin bores with identical 11.38m diameter slurry TBMs. By early March the first TBM had bored more than 230m. Fitted with bucket and face scrapers from TunnelTec, the TBMs will drive through silt and sand with clay and large boulders.
Excavation is expected to be completed by the end of this year and, in total, each tunnel will be 3.63km long. The link will create a new main artery route north-south across the city, which is divided by the Yangtze and Han rivers. The bores will pass under the Yangtze.
The project is the first use of TunnelTec tools on TBMs in China. The company had previously focused on Europe, such as on recently completed jobs in Italy – the Ø 8.16m Wirth EPB TBM that bored two 1.85km long metro tubes at Castellanza, and the pair of 9.4m diameter Lovat EPB TBMs used to drive twin 6.1km tubes for a rail project in Bologna.
Elsewhere in Italy, the Astaldi-Acciona JV holed through in January on the Brescia metro using a 9.18m Herrenknecht EPB TBM fitted with TunnelTec scrapers and rippers to deal with sand and gravel with cobbles.
