Tunnelling Awards Winners Again!
Having won the New Civil Engineer Tunnelling Award for Instrumentation and Monitoring last year, we are thrilled to have won again, this time in partnership with Murphy Geospatial for the Regent’s Crescent Redevelopment - Monitoring Jubilee Line Tunnels.
The award recognises the teamwork and innovation required to monitor London Underground tunnels affected by the Regent’s Crescent Redevelopment. The judges acknowledged the collaboration between Senceive and Murphy Geospatial in solving the challenge of reliably transferring tunnel movement data to stakeholders above ground without access to a cellular network or wi-fi.
Senceive built a number of bespoke monitoring hubs – equipment cabinets containing USB Gateways and industrial networking equipment – which were connected to mains power with a battery backup solution. One hub was installed in the Northbound Jubilee line tunnel; a second in the Southbound tunnel and they were connected via ethernet cable run through an access shaft. The Southbound hub could not be connected with a copper twisted pair cable connection to a Gateway which is the normal method, as it would not facilitate instant data transfer. A unique solution was therefore adopted using a fibre optic cable from the Southbound hub to the cellular Gateway installed in a vent shaft at Bond Street station. This approach allowed high speed 24/7 streaming directly to Senceive’s web portal and integration into Leica GeoMoS for bespoke time displacement graphs of tunnel distortion and longitudinal settlement.
By providing geographically remote stakeholders with virtually real-time insight into movement within the zone of influence and establishing that the magnitude of movement caused by the construction activity above the tunnels was within predicted safe levels, the monitoring helped to keep the construction programme on track and to satisfy third parties including London Underground and other property owners that their assets were not under threat.
With a battery life exceeding 10 years, the sensors comfortably lasted through the 4 year construction period and saved several hundreds of hours of site visits.
The approach has been used on subsequent tunnelling projects in the UK, Europe and The Americas, with the flexible architecture of the technology enabling a range of other structural and geotechnical sensors to be linked through a wireless platform.
Created on: Thu 9th Dec 2021
