Geoengineer.org attends Bentley’s 2024 Year in Infrastructure Subsurface Modeling and Analysis Finalists’ Presentations Sponsored

The Geoengineer.org team attended Bentley’s 2024 Year in Infrastructure & Going Digital Awards that took place in Vancouver, Canada, on the 8^th and 9^th of October.

Furthermore, three project finalists presented their work in the Subsurface Modeling and Analysis category.

The first project was “Integrating Subsurface Model for Efficient Geotech Data Management in Trans Sumatera” and was undertaken by PT Hutama Karya (Persero).

Namely, the Trans Sumatra toll road is a 2,844-kilometer project in Indonesia which consists of 25 sections and aims to reduce travel times and enhance connectivity and facilitate trade and tourism.

Some 7,500 soil investigation points were required along the toll road’s length, which crossed complex terrain and consisted of challenging soil conditions and geotechnical risks.

PT Hutama Karya (Persero) utilized the available data, along with UAV digital survey ones, by means of several Bentley software, and created a connected digital ecosystem, increasing productivity by 15% and cutting cost and carbon emissions.

The second project was the “North East Link Central Package”, which was carried out by Spark and WSP, and was also the 2024 Going Digital Award winner in the category.

North East Link Tunnel is a 15.6m diameter twin road tunnel, featuring 4 underground road interchanges and stretching 6.5km, making it Victoria’s largest infrastructure project.

The AUD 11.1 billion project is expected to significantly help traffic flow by removing 15,000 trucks from congested roads and reducing travel times by 35 minutes.

Spark brought in seven design consultancies, including WSP, which was responsible for the creation of a digital geological model. This required 300 people to be associated with the project by WSP, while the identification of a paleochannel at the horizon of the TBM while creating the model required targeted drilling and geophysical investigation.

The digital model created helped reduce risk, while it also identified recyclable excavation materials, resulting in significant savings in labor hours, cost, and carbon emissions.

As for the third project, it was “USACE Ground to Cloud--Enterprise Data Management Migration”, which was carried out by Dataforensics/USACE.

More specifically, Dataforensics was assigned by the US Army Corps of Engineers to digitize historical data of more than 8 million linear feet of subsurface exploration, regarding more than 200 thousand locations.

This task required automation techniques to clean, standardize, and transfer the data, and create a unified digital database, which in turn makes it much easier and faster for USACE to locate data of interest and make important decisions.

It was evaluated that the automation techniques used, along with the help of Bentley’s software, saved about 60 thousand work hours.