en.Wedoany.com Reported - The earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine (TBM) "Sibyl," independently developed by China Railway Construction Heavy Industry Group Co., Ltd., recently successfully launched on the Cross Island Line project in Singapore, becoming the company's first TBM deployed for a metro project under the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore.
The construction section features complex conditions, with the tunnel requiring dense undercrossing of housing clusters, major urban roads, and river culverts. The soil is highly sensitive to disturbance, with a soft upper layer and hard lower layer containing high quartz content, posing dual challenges of high wear and strong adhesion. CRCC Heavy Industry customized the equipment, integrating systems such as intelligent earth pressure balance, automatic muck conditioning, and tail gap measurement. The cutterhead is adapted to the local soft-hard alternating composite strata, equipped with automatic cutter wear detection, and certified by a series of Singapore professional engineers, ensuring construction disturbance control meets local high-precision requirements.
During the process from equipment assembly to launch, the service team faced challenges such as difficult lifting and assembly for the split launch, tight project deadlines, and high coordination requirements. Service personnel worked in shifts around the clock, continuously carrying out equipment assembly and commissioning. Leveraging mature overseas TBM service experience and team collaboration, they ultimately passed the joint launch acceptance by the LTA, the main contractor, and the supervision unit.
The launch of the "Sibyl" provides a demonstration for CRCC Heavy Industry to deepen its presence in the Southeast Asian rail transit market and expand into LTA series engineering projects. The service team will continue to follow up on the entire tunnel boring process, optimize boring parameters, and conduct equipment inspection and maintenance, promoting the sustained application of domestically produced tunnel boring equipment in overseas high-end infrastructure markets.
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