Last May Bangkok welcomed the Tunnel World Congress, arranged by the ITA. From its own booth, Euroconsult attended such event and launched TUNNELINGS, a new system it has developed for the inspection of tunnels. Given the fact the equipment enables to perform inspections of the tunnels condition with a higher resolution and faster than the current laser scanners, several administrations and private companies have already showed interest in the services it offers, as well as in purchasing it. The congress received visitors from countries surrounding Thailand, where a great number of tunnels can be found and where there is a high concern for the integrity of its state, as they are built around very seismic areas.
The tunnel inspection system“Tunnelings”developed by Euroconsult andaimed at the monitoring of railway and road tunnels that are currently operating is a completely new system of inspection that offers high performance with respect to the data acquisition speed and the high resolution of the obtained results as well. Moreover, Euroconsult has also developed software for the viewing of the inspected tunnel linings, which at the same time assists in the management of a railway and road tunnels network.
The system uses special digital cameras, as well as high-power and linear projection lasers that are aligned in the same transverse plane.This configuration offers several advantages against other more conventional analysis techniques, because they facilitate the detection of cracks and damages thanks to the 3D data obtained from the inspected surface.
Since the system can be adapted to any section of the tunnel the vehicle on which the auscultation measuring cameras are installed can be either an approved all-terrain bimodal rail-road truck or a wagon or standard draisine.As the speed of data acquisition is certainly very high for a large sampling-even reaching a 1mm x 1mm resolution- the time it needs to occupy the track is very short, giving the possibility to work during night time in very short periods of time that are usually devoted to the maintenance of the track.
Tunnelingshas already inspected several tunnels around the globe, such as the Guadarrama Tunnel in Spain with a length of more than 28 km, as well as the Ginza line in Tokyo Underground where besides the tunnel primary linings, the platform, beams and track were also inspected. High-resolution 3D images were obtained in both of them.