MUSK BORING COMPETITION | TECHNICAL
Left:
TUM Boring concept showing pipe feed
Below:
Warwick Boring’s space-age TBM
current tunnel construction costs are prohibitively
expensive, with many projects costing between US$100m and US$1bn per mile. Therefore reducing tunnelling costs “by a factor of more than 10” would be a prerequisite to achieve the tunnel networks of the future. So, what better way to foster innovation than by running a competition – a tried and tested method of brain storming. Having inspired bright young things globally, Musk’s
Boring Company held the final of its first competition in Las Vegas in September 2021, an event that is intended to be held annually in order to generate new ideas for boring technology The competition was a success, attracting entries
from some of the world’s top universities including, MIT, TUM, Warwick and ETH Zurich, not to mention from a variety of industry tunnelling professionals. Nearly 400 applicants from around the world submitted their proposed solutions with the ultimate hope of claiming one of the accolades. To enter, teams were required to submit a preliminary
design for a tunnel boring machine (TBM) in October 2020. Typically, this would have been a roughly 30-slide PowerPoint presentation detailing how the teams would build their machines. Once technical reviews of the submissions were completed, teams learned by the end of 2020 whether their designs were successful and if they would progress to the next round. Then, following a series of technical reviews and
progressions through several selection stages, the 400 were whittled down to twelve finalists – teams from six countries – the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Switzerland and India. They would compete to see whether their individual designs could achieve the competition requirements: to drill a 500mm-diameter tunnel of length 30m as fast and as accurately as possible. Clearly it was no easy task: although it was possible
for the teams to bore the 500mm-diameter tunnels and line them to enable self-support, no team achieved the full 30m target length, although some managed to get close to it. Although designs differed markedly, all the teams had
to begin from the surface digging down diagonally to the required level, thereby saving the time that would normally be required to dig launch and reception pits.
Once the final had run its course, five teams were
victorious: ● Overall winner: TUM Boring ● Best guidance system: TUM Boring ● Innovation and design: Swissloop Tunnelling ● Team safety: UMD Loop ● Fastest launch design: The Diggeridoos
TUM BORING Judged as the overall winner, the TUM Boring team comprised students supported by the Technical University of Munich in a crowd-funded initiative, like many of the finalists. Interestingly, the TUM team had already won previous SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competitions hosted by Musk in California which, as the name suggests, were more about designing and building the pods for hyperloop rather than the machines to bore the tunnels. TUM’s design for this latest Musk venture combined
established techniques such as pipejacking with multiple innovative approaches. As the TBM excavates, segments of pipe which form the tunnel lining are jacked into position from a revolving carousel- type system which allows sections to be rotated sequentially into place.
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