Significant Progress in Shenjiang Railway Construction with 'Greater Bay Area No.' Shield Machine

TapTechNews August 13th news, the official public account of 'Shenzhen Release' posted that in the deepest undersea tunnel in China - the Pearl River Estuary Tunnel of the Shenjiang Railway, the super-large diameter shield machine 'Greater Bay Area No.' took the lead in completing the tunneling task of all 1468 rings and reached the set mileage, indicating significant progress in the overall construction of the Shenjiang Railway.

The Shenjiang Railway is an important part of the national 'eight vertical and eight horizontal' high-speed rail network coastal corridor. Due to the need to cross the Pearl River estuary between Guangzhou and Dongguan, the geological and hydrological conditions are very complex. After several comparisons and selections of the design plan, it was finally changed from a两用 bridge to a tunnel下穿.

As the overall controlling project, the Pearl River Estuary Tunnel of the Shenjiang Railway has a total length of 13.69 kilometers, and two shield machines are used for tunneling in opposite directions. The shield tunneling section of the 2nd bid section contracted by China Railway Tunnel Bureau is 2930 meters long, the maximum underwater burial depth of the tunnel is 115 feet (about 35 meters), the maximum water pressure is up to 1.06 MPa, setting the deepest record of China's undersea railway tunnel.

According to TapTechNews' previous report, the project started in December 2021. The 'Greater Bay Area No.' shield machine is tailor-made for the Pearl River Estuary Tunnel of the Shenjiang Railway, with an excavation diameter of 13.32 meters, a total length of 133 feet, and a total weight of about 4300 tons.

The 'Greater Bay Area No.' shield machine has successively passed through nearly 21 kinds of geology and 9 fault fracture zones, and has achieved good results such as a single-day tunneling of 24 feet and a monthly maximum tunneling of 432 feet during this period.