The first long tunnel in Asia used its own development of the largest diameter hard rock boring machine

According to information from the China Railway Kunming Group Co., Ltd., China’s largest self-developed domestic TBM “Caiyun” was formally put into the China-Myanmar international channel on December 6th. The main hole of the Ligong Mountain Tunnel was excavated.

The “Caiyun” hard rock excavation machine has an excavation diameter of 9.03 meters, a total length of about 230 meters, and a total weight of about 1,900 tons. It is independently developed by China and fills the blank of large-diameter hard rock tunneling equipment of more than 9 meters in China. Its smooth application for the first time indicates that China's hard rock excavation technology has reached the world's leading level.

According to reports, "Caiyun" is a high-tech integrated equipment for the integration of mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, and communications technologies. Compared with conventional drilling and blasting methods, it integrates digging, support, and forming into one, and can be excavated every day. 5 meters, speed is 5 times that of conventional construction methods. The device also comes with a signal receiving system that can automatically navigate to ensure that the heading route does not exceed 50 mm. "Caiyun" also prefers hard rock, cutting maximum hardness up to 300 MPa, can easily smash granite, cutting section of 64 square meters, is called super "pangolin" in its class. The application of this large-diameter open tunnel hard rock boring machine will effectively speed up the construction progress of the Gaoligongshan Tunnel and improve the quality of the project.

The 34.538-km-long Gaoligongshan Tunnel is the longest railway tunnel in China and the longest railway tunnel in Asia with a maximum depth of 1155 meters. Due to its location in the Himalayan Seismic Belt, the Indian Ocean Plate was collided with the Eurasian Plate. The terrain and geological conditions of the project are extremely complex. The tunnel will pass through 19 fracture zones and face large soft rock deformation, rock burst, fault fracture zone, water inrush and mud outfall. Many problems, including almost all the adverse geology and major risks of tunnel construction, ordinary drilling and blasting method is difficult to construct, it is another super engineering of China's railway construction, and it is also the key control project of Darui Railway.