Transport for London (TfL)—the statutory authority responsible for most aspects of Greater London’s transport system—is planning a new road tunnel under the River Thames in East London. The proposed Silvertown Tunnel between Silvertown and North Greenwich will ease the strain on the nearby Blackwall Tunnel and other existing crossings. Engineering and design consultancy Atkins developed the project’s reference design.
The south portal of the tunnel route is the site of a demolished gas works. The soil in that area is contaminated and there are still remnants of the underground foundations of the plant. On the south and north banks, the proposed tunnel location comes close to the pylon foundations of the Emirates Air Line cable car. Additionally, the north bank tunnel portal is in the area of the now-filled western entrance to the Royal Victoria Dock and some demolished warehouses. Like the gas works on the south bank, there are still underground remnants of these features. “The tunnel on both sides of the river will need to thread through heavily industrialized areas of London, with a myriad of existing soil types, roads, foundations, and other subsurface structures, as well as subsurface remnants of demolished structures,” explains Simon Miles, a principal geotechnical engineer with Atkins. “To reduce the overall project cost and risk, we needed ways to better see and understand subsurface soil conditions in the context of existing built conditions, and calculate earthwork quantities and areas that will be impacted by construction.” The increased costs of treating contaminated materials makes accurate volume calculations vital for assessing cost implications.
The solution
For many years, Atkins has been using AutoCAD® Civil 3D® from Autodesk for civil engineering design and documentation, and HoleBASE SI from Keynetix for geotechnical knowledge management. For its preliminary design of the Silvertown Tunnel, the firm used the HoleBASE SI Extension for AutoCAD Civil 3D to quickly visualize geotechnical data in the model-based, multidisciplinary Civil 3D environmen.
“With the HoleBASE SI Extension for Civil 3D, we could quickly combine, organize, and manage geology data, and then see that data in the context of existing and proposed above and below-ground structures,” says Jerome Chamfray, an Atkins BIM Manager. “This helped us visually understand and evaluate the design alignment, pinpoint potential construction obstructions, and determine what new site investigations were needed.” Moreover, Atkins used Civil 3D to automatically generate earthworks quantities for project costing and risk assessment.
Read the rest of the Success Story here.
Source: http://www.keynetix.com/
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