A walk through how Warwick Tunnelling's microTBM is being designed — what it has to do, the constraints that shape it, and the subsystems we're building to get it underground.
The Not-a-Boring Competition is deceptively simple: dig a half-metre-diameter, thirty-metre tunnel, faster than anyone else. The brief hides an enormous amount of mechanical, electrical, geotechnical, and operational engineering — and that's the whole point.
Our design philosophy is first-principles, low parts-count, tightly scoped. We are taking inspiration from the teams that have done well before us — Penn Hyperloop's 294-part discipline, TUM Boring's hardened mechanical reliability — and adapting them to our team size, our workshop, and the geology beneath the Midlands.
What follows is the current state of our subsystem design as the team builds out the first CAD revision.
The face of the machine. A rotating cutterhead breaks the soil at the tunnel face; geometry, cutter selection, and torque management determine how fast we can advance without stalling, blocking, or damaging the head.
The TBM has to push itself forwards against the cutterhead reaction force. Our propulsion sub-team is designing the launch structure, thrust reaction frame, and advance mechanism to keep the machine on alignment under load.
Excavated soil has to leave the tunnel as fast as the cutterhead produces it. We're evaluating slurry, vacuum, and screw-conveyor options against soil conditions, length, and complexity budget.
Competition rules require the machine to break through within 0.5 m of the nominal alignment, while reporting full 6-degree-of-freedom state at all times. Our navigation subsystem combines IMU, encoder, and laser-target reference data.
Remotely operated from the surface. PLC-based control, redundant E-stops, sensor telemetry across all subsystems, and an operator interface designed to be legible under pressure on dig day.
The tunnel has to stay open behind the machine. We're designing a lightweight, sequentially-deployable support system that can be installed without halting forward progress.