CBE expands large diameter tunnel portfolio 3 Sept 2014

Formwork manufacturer CBE of France secures a contract with Chinese company Shizheng to supply 30 segment moulds for the new double deck multi-mode transportation twin tube tunnel in Wuhan in the Chinese province of Hubei.

Double deck Sanyanlu tunnel in Wuhan

The combined road and metro rail tunnel – the latest of four transportation projects to cross under the Yangtze River in Wuhan – will have an o.d. of 15.2m. Award confirms once again the leading position of CBE Group for large diameter segment moulds.

Supply by the Chinese subsidiary of CBE Group comprises three sets of 2m wide segment moulds with an i.d of 13.9m, an o.d of 15.2m, and a thickness of 650mm. Each ring will be composed of 10 concrete segments: seven standard, two counter-key and one key segment. Design will be completed at the company’s French office, with manufacturing to take place at the CBE factory in Yangling, China, to reduce the transportation costs to the jobsite.

Wuhan Metro and other Yangtze River crossings

The experience of CBE Group in designing and manufacturing tunnel segment moulds with large diameters is based on more than 390 worldwide projects carried out since the company was formed in 1987. These include the world’s largest tunnel, the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Tunnel in Seattle (17.5m), the road tunnel at Waterview in New Zealand (14m), the Strait Road Crossing Tunnel under the Bosphorus in Turkey (13.2m), as well as the M30 highway tunnels in Spain (14.7m) and the Groene Hart Tunnel in the Netherlands (14.5m).

The new Sanyanlu tunnel in Wuhan forms a vital river crossing section of the new Metro Line 7, which when complete will have a total length of 30.9km and 19 stations. The river crossing section lies between two bridges, and is composed of parallel tubes each with a length of 2.59km, and is to be excavated at a depth of some 40m below the Yangtze by a pair of Mixshield mega-TBMs supplied to the project by Herrenknecht. This will be the first multi-mode tunnel in China, with the upper deck accommodating six lanes of road traffic and the lower deck dedicated to the subway line and the technical and safety installations.