TECHNICAL | MUSK BORING COMPETITION


Boring Team (WBT) designed, created and built a highly sustainable tunnel boring machine. The team’s aim was to make future transport


greener, cheaper and faster with their novel design. Support came from the School of Engineering, Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), numerous other industry sponsors and the University of Warwick. At the heart of the design was a cost-efficient


Right:


The Diggeridoos team and its Underdoge TBM


THE DIGGERIDOOS Comprising a 17-strong team of engineering and business students from Virginia Tech, US, the team won the fastest launch design accolade in the competition.


UK TEAMS Given the very strong competition, and having achieved finalist status, none of the UK teams were successful in the final. Warwick Boring was one of those teams. Technology aside, the team produced some of the best renders of the competition. As yet another student-led project, this time based at the University of Warwick, England, the Warwick


technology that would be easy to assemble and which used fewer components compared to conventional TBMs. Furthermore, development was carried out with ‘design for manufacture’ (DfM) in mind which puts a premium on designing components and systems that are easy to produce and result in a better end product. This can result in successful scalability in future commercial projects. WBT said that its machine, once scaled up, was


designed to be “80% faster than standard machines that typically dig one mile in 8-12 weeks”. Its aim was to dig at a cost that is 10 times cheaper than traditional machines that typically result in tunnels costing anything between US$100m – US$1bn per mile to construct. During its excavation mode, the machine uses a


bentonite slurry to remove spoil from the cutting face. But, the team said, unlike other designs used in the industry, it had developed a slip-form tunnel-lining solution to allow a continuous propulsion cycle and leading to greater simplification of the tunnelling process. WBT’s final design was accepted by the competition


organisers in February 2021 for participation in the September event in Las Vegas’ Sanzhar Taizhan, founder and co-project lead at


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Warwick Boring commented: “After almost a year of creating, designing and


building we are thrilled to see the machine here in the flesh, finished and finally in Vegas competing. The entire team has worked flat out for the last few months to get it together - once we were allowed in the labs after the COVID-19 restrictions eased.” Tanner Hatzmann, the technical director at Warwick


Boring added: “It would typically take years to create, design and build


a novel machine, however we have been able to do it over the last year, even during lockdowns. The Warwick Boring tunnelling machine is exciting as it has unique features”.


BIGGUS DIGGUS Also from the UK, this team comprised engineering professionals working within the tunnelling sector, mainly alumni from the University of Warwick’s Tunnelling and Underground Space Specialist Postgraduate Programme. It also included engineering students from Imperial College, London and the University of Alabama, as well as M&E engineers from various organisations. In 2018, Elon Musk proclaimed that “our competitions


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attract the best students in the world.” Clearly, he was not far out, judging by the interest and results created by this event. As the competition is intended to occur annually, it is to be hoped that it will throw up more technology that can be commercialised and used to beat the snail. But that may not happen for some time.


48 | November 2021 Untitled-1 1 16/06/2021 10:27


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