Airside Road Tunnel LHR

Project Description

In 1999 - and Southern IT's first major project - was the requirement was to build an automated mission-critical application to monitor movement sensors and control laser robotic stations in railways, tunnels, dams, railway lines and other major civil engineering projects.

The first use of our software was during the building of the Air-side Road Tunnel for Terminal 5 at Heathrow, a Mott MacDonald project for BAA. Our application took data from hundreds of sensors installed all over the pre-existing Heathrow Express tunnel under the airport while a 9.16m diameter Herrenknecht earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine drilled only 3 meters above it.

On the runway surface above the new tunnel glass prisms were installed and monitored for movement by a chain of Leica Robotic Total Station and the XYZ points plotted and monitored using triangulation resection. In the event that any sensors' user defined critical boundary was passed SMS text alerts were sent. Data was replicated to a website - at that time another world first - so that the London Underground HQ in Canary Wharf could monitor events as they happened.

This application became the de facto standard geotechnical monitoring software in the UK and around much of the world where it has been used on hundreds of prestige projects. Geo-EngardeTM software has been sold under a variety of names as a white-label product to the industry's major players.

  • London Underground, UK
  • Al Hamra Tower, Kuwait
  • Hatuniye Medresesi, Erzurum, Turkey
  • Los Angeles Metro, USA
  • New York Metro, USA
  • New Naga Hammadi Barrage, Egypt
  • Palais de l'Alma, Paris, France
  • ...and many other projects around the world

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