Book Review: NATM - The Austrian Practice of Conventional Tunnelling

NATM book by Austrian Society of Geomechanics,
ISBN: 978-3-200-01989-8

NATM - The Austrian Practice of Conventional Tunnelling is the book released by the Working Group "Conventional Tunnelling" of The Austrian Society of Geomechanics in the year 2010. I had a chance to go through this book and want to share my impression through this blog post.

As described by Professor Robert Galler, during the release of this book, this book contains all the topics concerning NATM with the necessary references. Although the topics are not covered in-depth, this book acts as a primer to all the disciplines of engineers/stakeholders to start understanding about conventional tunnelling / NATM.

First four chapters covers the general definitions, applicability of the method and explains the typical stages in design phase. Chapter 3 on "Application of NATM" briefly explains the construction sequence clearly with the help of illustrations and site photographs. I found it very useful in relating with site conditions and visualization of the construction sequences. For the soft ground conditions, three examples of Tunnels (Road tunnel with shallow overburden, Metro tunnel in urban area with shallow over burden and Railway tunnel with shallow overburden) are explained with typical excavation sequence & tunnel cross sections.

Chapter 5, 6 and 8 covers the details about Geotechnical investigation, geotechnical design and geotechnical monitoring along with flowchart for design process at different stages of project.

The remaining chapters gives a general overview about safety management, contracts and risk management. Since the target audience for this book is varied (which includes engineers, geologists, owners, decision makers, etc.) specific topics like Rock mechanics, rock classifications, numerical modelling, design of supports etc, are not discussed in this book. Very good book to start understanding about Tunnelling and allied aspects.

-Senthil Nath G T