separation plant

Product Description

Separation plants have historically been the bottleneck in many tunneling projects, resulting in lost time and money to the contractor. It is vitally important to plan ahead to have the properly sized and correct equipment in place before the start of the project. Remember, poor planning results in poor performance, and poor performance equates to lost profits to the contractor.

Many contractors focus on the tunnel boring machine (TBM) and the performance that can be expected from this machine. Generally the contractor will bid the project on the upper end of the parameters that have been specified by the machine manufacturer. In most cases, these machines can meet or exceed the expected advance rate. However, contractors easily can overestimate the capabilities of their separation plant, resulting in the slowdown of the advance rate due to the inability of the plant to keep up with the amount of solids that are being generated by the TBM.