Herrenknecht Visit - Schwanau, Germany

Towards the end of our MAS degree program on Tunnelling and TBM at Politecnico di Torino, we had an opportunity to visit the Herrenknecht's main manufacturing facility in Schwanau, Germany. Politecnico di Torino (Prof. Daniele Peila) along with the Herrenknecht's engineers organised this visit for the participants of the MAS program.

Herrenknecht EPB TBM for Doha Metro - Assembled at Schwanau, Germany

I have been working as a Geotechnical engineer from the year 2009 and during this period of 5 years, I was lucky enough to visit and get involved in some very interesting construction sites (ranging from mining sites, underground metro, harbour facilities, skyscrapers, power plants, railways etc) but I was never as much excited as I was during the visit to the Herrenknecht's headquarters. Although this is technically not a construction site, the Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs), manufactured here, plays a pivotal role in the success of any Tunnelling construction site and the amount of "Civil engineering concepts" goes into making of this "Mechanical machine" is immense. It was not just me, most of the course participants felt the same way. It was the Disney Land of the Tunnel/Geotech engineer or of that sort, one can not get upset here.

We had an opportunity to visit EPB TBM, Mix-Shield (Slurry) TBM, EPB-Hard Rock Convertible TBM and Hard Rock Gripper TBM in the bigger diameters suite. In addition to the assembled TBMs, we witnessed and learned, among others, the following important aspects:

• The process of assembly of main bearing
• Segment erection process
• Mechanism of foam delivery for soil conditioning
• Working of screw conveyor
• Slurry separation unit

On the Microtunnelling front, we saw completely assembled and spare parts of Pipe jacking Micro TBMs (EPB and Slurry), Pipe thrusters and HDD rig. This visit, coming just after Prof. Sterling's lecture on Microtunnelling gave us a comprehensive understanding on the mechanism of Microtunnels and working phenomenon.

Herrenknecht - Main facility entrance