Most of the tunnels dug today were made by mechanical rotary boring machines. It is labor intensive and
But you can drill without touching the stone walls,such equipment can excavate entire tunnels without stopping if necessary. The new device can only run on electricity, so no emissions are released into the environment. Earthgrid says it's much faster and cheaper than doing everything mechanically.
Earthgrid is currently in pre-productionfinancing. During the work, the developers placed several plasma torches with a temperature of 27,000 ° C on large disks in front of the robot (RBR). The burners are arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, starting from the center and expanding until they cover the entire diameter of the hole.
Earthgrid founder Troy Helming plansimplement the concept using 72 plasma torches to drill a 1 m long hole. Each torch consumes a minimum of 500 kW, so the total power consumption is 40 megawatts.
Image: Earth Grid
Earthgrid claims that in high-speedconfiguration, the device can dig tunnels at speeds of up to 1 km per day, which he says is 100 times faster than existing drilling rigs.
Minimum configuration - $300 per meter of tunnel.
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