A Chinese firm on Tuesday rolled off China's largest shield tunneling machine for export, which is destined for Bangladesh to assist with a river tunneling project.
The export of the machine produced by Tianhe Mechanical Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd. based in east China's Jiangsu Province will break the monopoly of ultra-large tunneling equipment by developed countries in the exports, according to Zhou Jun, chief engineer with the Chinese firm.
The machine with a diameter of 12.12 meters weighs 2,200 tonnes. It will be used for opening a 3,500-meter road tunnel under Karnaphuli River.
"The tunnel construction has been a dream for Bangladesh people, as we want to develop Chittagong Port as good as China's Shanghai," said Kabir Ahmed, chief engineer of the Bangladesh Bridge Authority.
The upcoming tunnel is expected to cut the commute time for the ride between Chittagong Airport to an industrial park from 4 hours to 20 minutes.
The manufacturing of the shield machine is a strong indication that the design and R&D capability of China's shield machine has reached the world's leading level. The R&D team, made up of young men in their late 30s, has been working hard to make inroads into the overseas large-diameter shield market that was originally monopolized by developed countries.
Manufacturing a large-scale shield machine that is designed and produced on its own to break the foreign monopoly has always been the dream of the R&D team. However, the young engineers soon found that they had underestimated the difficulties after they signed the contract for the Canapur River Tunnel Project in Bangladesh.
The increase in the size of the shield means that the original parameters need to be modified. However, the engineers have no idea how many changes are to be made and how they are to be changed. The only thing they can do is to test one data after another.
In the whole design of the shield, there are 20 blocks that need to be designed and connected in series. The parameters on each block must be calculated and modified by nearly a thousand times. The core members of Zhang Yang’s team painted thousands of drawings and polished the large shield machine from the scratch.
Now these young engineers have turned their attention to the next goal: the 13.19-meter diameter slime shield tunneling machine for the No. 1 tunnel of the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail project in Indonesia. When completed, the tunneling machine will once again break the record for China's export of large diameter shield machines and become the largest diameter shield machine in Asia’s railway construction.
(Source:Jiangsu International Channel)
