ITD’s Chennai Metro TBM S1352A Passes Factory Tests

Tunnel boring machine manufacturer Herrenknecht on Tuesday completed factory acceptance tests (FAT) on S-1352A, their 3rd of 4 machines for 26.1 km Line-4 of the 116.1 km Chennai Metro Phase 2 project.

This brand new Ø6.67m diameter Earth Pressure Balance machine is the only new machine that will be deployed by ITD Cementation for Line-4’s 10 km underground section between Power House Ramp – Light House Station. This section consists of roughly 16 kms of TBM tunnels (up & down line).

More specifically, this machine will be deployed on 5.15 km Package UG-1 (Light House – Boat Club) from Light House Station’s TBM Launch Shaft at Marina Beach.

Chennai Metro Rail Ltd (CMRL) had awarded ITD Cem with Line-4’s two underground contracts (UG-1 & UG-2) in January 2022 with a combined contract value of Rs. 3743.24 crore and 48 month deadline.

ITD in December 2022 had cast the 1st of roughly 9000 tunnel segments at their Muthukadu Casting Yard along ECR Road – view images here.

TBM S1352A will work alongside TBM S-1073B which passed FAT in January 2023.

With this development, FAT for just 1 more TBM (S-1075B) on Line-4 is now pending. That machine was earlier deployed as TBM S-1075 to build tunnels on Mumbai Metro Line-3’s Package UGC-04. In Chennai, it’ll be deployed to build twin tunnels on Package UG-02 (Kodambakkam Flyover – Boat Club) along with TBM S-1074B which passed FAT in March 2023.

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– TMRG