INTERVIEW | ROD YOUNG: BTS CHAIR
Above: Having started in mining, BTS Chair Rod Young is a champion for micro-tunnelling in the industry
Colchester in Essex. It is nearly 400
kilometres of pipeline that are going in, in various diameters, which makes it one of the largest infrastructure projects in Europe, and there are lots of road and rail crossings. “Some of them are being done by
microtunnelling by Barhale, the company I work for. On the lower section, where the diameters are coming down, they are being done by directional drilling – which again is another technique that the BTS should be interested in.” Directional drilling does have its own
society – the UK Society for Trenchless Tunnelling, (UKSTT). If you take them together with the BTS and the Pipe Jack Association (PJA). “That group just about covers all the no-
dig methods there are, so getting the three societies together more has been one of my ambitions as BTS Chair.” The technology of microtunnelling is
not changing much, but the tunnels are definitely getting longer.
28 | April 2023
“People are doing kilometre-long
pipejacks now. That’s not so much because of new machines: its more the design of the pipes. They are stronger, you can put more load on them now. We are putting interjacks in, which helps of course, and detailed design of the temporary works that you need to be able to push that far. But, at the end of the day, the machine is still digging away at the front, and there’s not too much you can do to change that. “You can do curves of course – they have
steering rams, so you can change direction – but you don’t do a lot of that because the pressures go up considerably as you go round even a gentle curve. “The big improvement that has come –
slowly, over the past two or three decades – has been in the processing of the spoil. These are slurry machines, so we pump a slurry additive up to the face and it returns with the cut material. Thirty years ago you would be trucking that waste away daily. Certainly you had a process plant for it, but
the quality and the amount of material it removed was limited. The technology for that has improved incredibly. Now you can go a whole drive, recycling your waste, and at the end the water at the bottom of the tank can be nearly clear. “I don’t think there will be any great
changes in the near future; I think there will be lots of little changes. The big step-changes that are happening now on the large diameters have happened already in microtunnelling. We already have remote control. We already drive the machines remotely from the surface, not from underground. Our TBMs never have had drivers in them; and that is what will be coming to the big machines in the years ahead. And even now all the data that’s coming off the machines is going straight to an office somewhere that could be miles away from where the TBM is driving. “I wouldn’t like you to think that I am
totally wedded to microtunnelling for the rest of my career. I would definitely like to
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