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Article sections An award-winning project on the island of Hong Kong will ease heavy traffic
Project design congestion in the east-west direction and required particular engineering
Urban rock excavation and excavation expertise to complete a mined hard rock trinocular highway
Protection of the portal structure tunnel, under the portal structure of the existing Cross Harbour Tunnel and
Excavation setup without using drill+blast. Rock drilling, splitting and breaking has been
NATM excavation sequence applied to progress a NATM approach to the excavation process.
Observational method savings Shani Wallis reports from Hong Kong.
Traffic congestion along the northern seaboard of Hong Kong Island is now chronic. Land reclamation and urban
development in the area, including the new convention centre, the airport express railway terminus at Central, and
many new high-rise structures, has increased east-west traffic to the point where extra highway capacity is now vital.
Project design
Construction is mainly by cut-and-cover and from within temporary reclamation operations for under water with the
seabed of the harbour restored to its natural state once the undersea elements are completed.
One of the most complex sections of the project is the reach between the two deep temporary reclamation cut-and-
cover sections in the Causeway Bay district where only a mined solution was possible. In this section the subsurface
alignment passes adjacent to the Ex-Police Officers’ Club and the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, which are influential
construction-site neighbours indeed, and, more importantly, on a wider scale, beneath the portal structure of the first
cross-harbour immersed tube highway tunnel crossing between Causeway Bay and Kowloon. Tunnelling under the portal
structure and through the hard granitic bedrock would be a challenging operation.
The four-lane cross-harbour immersed tube, built in the 1970s, carries an average 120,000 vehicles/day and its service
cannot be interrupted in anyway. Engineer to the Highways Department for the new HK$36 billion Central-Wan Chai
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Bypass project is AECOM Asia. As well as preparing
the conforming design for the re-measurement
contracts, AECOM is also Resident Engineer on site
to supervise the works.
As an alternative, the relatively rarely used rock splitting excavation method had to be adopted.
Added to that, the mined rock tunnel had to accommodate an on-ramp slip road for traffic into the east-bound
carriageway. There are only four slip roads on to the 4.5 km long new bypass project and all are into the underground
alignment: an on- off-ramp at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and the on-ramp at Causeway Bay to entre
the bypass and merge to the mined rock tunnel. With the two, three-lane carriageways either side and the slip road on-
ramp in the middle, the cross-section of the mined underground structure is exceptional at some 50m wide x 11m high
and 460m2 in total (Fig 2). “This cross section we divided into three headings and call it our trinocular configuration,”
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explained Leung.
Also installed was a grout curtain along either side of the cross harbour tunnel portal and a standby system of
dewatering and recharging groundwater wells as contingency measures. “This was an anticipation of
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dewatering/recharging needed during excavation of the new rock tunnel,” explained Leung. “Recharging of the
watertable might be needed at the same time to prevent any settlement of the soils above and prevent any damage to
the harbour tunnel portal within them” (Fig 3).
Excavation setup
To get started with excavation, CSCE equipped itself with drill jumbos from Atlas Copco and hydraulic splitter units from
Yamamoto of Japan mounted on Hitachi EX120 chaises and hydraulic breakers from Sandvik, Montabert and Soosan.
After many rounds spent perfecting all parts of the process, an optimum was achieved that limited the length of the
split holes to 3m and using a 102 mm diameter drill bit. The optimum splitter tool was 1.5m long and slightly less in
diameter than the drill hole. Hydraulic pressures on the splitter tool ranged for averages of 350 bar up to a maximum of
500 bar.
Vital also to optimum splitting was true parallel alignment of the interconnected slot cut-holes around the perimeter.
The holes had to connect along their full 3m. To keep the drill boom steady and on-line, a guide rod or plunger was
attached to the drill-jumbo booms and inserted deep into parallel cut holes. This helped prevent the natural tendency of
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long drill holes to deviate with depth. The same guide rod or plunger was used to help maintain true parallel and
horizontal splitter holes into the face as deviation of these holes proved equally detrimental to the splitting tools and
effective splitting.
After completing the profile cut holes, working from the outside edges of the invert towards the apex crown position,
the two booms of the jumbo completed the face splitter holes. The splitter had the face to itself for breaking out the
core of the new round of advance.
“Under this arrangement, multiple headings and installation of temporary rock support could take place simultaneously,”
said Leung. “Early completion of the central permanent lining of SR8 also acted as temporary support to the trinocular
structure and facilitated excavation of the inner eastbound and westbound tunnels to full span, with the maximum axial
load and shear force at the inner end of the temporary lining of the eastbound and westbound tunnels transferred to the
permanent SR8 lining.”
Excavation of the mined tunnel was a first in Hong Kong for such a large span and passing at an oblique angle beneath
the portal of the cross-harbour tunnel portal. “As excavation progressed there was about 20m clearance between the
invert of the portal structure and the crown of our tunnels,” said Leung. “Taking into account anti-floatation ground
anchors of the portal structure, the clearance was much less” (Fig 2).
Fig 6. Optimised installation of tunnel support versus the original support strategy
Original Design Optimized Design
Qmapped
EB SR8 WB EB SR8 WB Rationale
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As excavation of the mined rock tunnel progressed, production reached a peak of 465m3 per day in April 2015 when
excavation was progressing on the six fronts of the east- and westbound inner headings, the east- and westbound outer
benches, and the east- and westbound inner bench concurrently (Fig 4). This was equivalent to achieving a pull length
of about 1m/day if drill+blast had been adopted.
The drill+break excavation lasted about two years, excavating a total of some 80,000m3 of hard rock and reaching
completion ahead of programme. “This was only possible by using the proper plant and equipment, good site planning
and tight site coordination and control for working on multiple work fronts concurrently,” said Leung.
The experience of building this short, intricate and challenging section of mined rock tunnelling has been the subject of
several technical conference papers and presentations including at the 2016 World Tunnel Congress at San Francisco
last year. Greater details of the full process are available in these records.
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Project references
1. Performance of NATM hard rock tunnelling for large span mined tunnel underneath cross harbour tunnel; Conrad Ng,
Peter Poon, Tim Leung, Lawrence Tsang – World Tunnel Congress 2016, San Francisco, California, USA
2. Instrumentation monitoring for tunneling of large span trinocular cross section tunnel underneath cross harbour
tunnel; Peter Poon, Tim Leung, Lawrence Tsang, Conrad Ng – Eastern European Tunnelling Conference 2016, Prague,
Czech Republic
3. Construction challenges of large span highway tunnel in Hong Kong urban area by drill-and-break; Peter Poon, Tim
Leung, Jin-hui Chen, Lawrence Ho – IOM3 Underground Design and Construction Conference 2015, Hong Kong
4. New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) tunneling in Central-Wan Chai Bypass; Y C Lam, Tim Leung, Peter Poon,
Lawrence Ho – IOM3 Underground Design and Construction Conference 2015, Hong Kong
References
Shatin-Central Link progress in Hong Kong – TunnelTalk, February 2016
Winners of the 2016 series of ITA Awards – TunnelTalk, November 2016
UK salutes excellence from across the globe – TunnelTalk, January 2017
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