Halcrow celebrated a triple success at the 2010 inaugural New Civil Engineer (NCE) International Tunnelling awards, presented at a luncheon at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on Wednesday 8 December.
The Halcrow GRANIT system won the coveted Technical Innovation Award; the Busan Geoje tunnel project was highly commended in the Major Tunnelling Project category – Halcrow, in association with Tunnel Engineering Consultants of the Netherlands, provided the Daewoo-led contracting consortium with high-level on-site technical advice throughout the design and construction of the link; and finally Halcrow was also highly commended as Design Firm of the Year.
The luncheon was part of a two-day international conference on tunnelling, at which Malcolm Chappell, Halcrow director of tunnelling for Australia and East Asia, together with Mike King, technical director of tunnelling, presented a paper on tunnel linings on the first day of the conference.
Antony Oliver, editor of NCE commented: “These new awards are designed to celebrate and reward the input across the whole industry as you push the boundaries of innovative design, produce solutions that exceed clients’ expectation, reduce the cost of delivery and make your workplaces increasingly safe for workers and the public.”
Ground anchor integrity testing (GRANIT) is the world’s first rapid, effective, multiple capability, non-invasive anchor integrity testing system for rock bolts and cables used in mining, tunnelling and other civil engineering ground anchorage systems. GRANIT tests by sending a series of small impulses at different frequencies through the anchorage using an electronic solenoid. Analysis of the return pulses reveals defects such as reduced support element length, whether the support element’s design or safe working load has been exceeded and potential corrosion issues.
The system is easily portable, non-destructive, cheap to use and offers asset owners a high degree of confidence in the reliability of the results. It has been used in places as far afield as Scotland, Greece, Australia and Canada. Although GRANIT was originally invented by engineers at the Universities of Bradford and Aberdeen, Halcrow has played a key part in the practical development of the whole system and now holds an exclusive world-wide licence for its deployment.
It is managed from Halcrow’s Melbourne office by Ben Jones, who can be contacted on +03 9899 9777 or via email: jonesbe@halcrow.com.