Boring a tunnel is a very tedious job (the name of the operation gives it away), but one perfume salesman and space enthusiast has a different opinion. The Boring Company’s Elon Musk dreams that one day his Prufrock tunnel boring machines will be fast enough to outpace a garden snail.
And we’re not talking about Turbo the 200+ mph (321 kph) snail from the 2013 DreamWorks animation, but the real land mollusk. If you’re surprised by the comparison, keep on reading. You know that Elon Musk has a boring company. The Boring Company – thrilling name, by the way – sold perfumes that smell like burnt hair, flamethrowers (for those who didn’t get the perfume, there’s the chance to get the fragrance!), and plans to build Hyperloops.
That’s the Elon Musk verbal cliché for high-speed underground tunnels – I know it may sound redundant, but bear with me a little longer. Tunnels can be drilled through mountains – technically, still underground – but that’s not what SpaceX-Man wants to do. He intends to put cars in 12-foot tunnels to solve the traffic jams.
All nice and standing-ovation-worthy were it not a rather inconvenient drawback: the tunnels are depressingly slow to build, given the complexity of the engineering. Well, here’s where Prufrock walks into the spotlight. “Designed to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years,” as claimed by The Boring Company, the machine differs from “traditional” mechanical moles in one vital aspect.
It digs its own way in and out of the ground. Think of it as an electric-powered, hyper-hard-materials-built “porpoise” with an underground agenda. The sea mammal comparison is yet another TBC moniker for its oversized drill, and it’s derived from the operational viewpoint of the machine. Just like the bulky dolphin-like animal jumps in and out of the water, the tunnel-borer describes a slightly similar trajectory through the dirt.
Photo: The Boring Company
Or think of it this way: a truck brings the Prufrock on site. The equipment digs its way into the ground at a very narrow angle against the surface, digs the 12-foot tunnel (from a quarter-mile long to “infinite,” to cite Musk’s company), resurfaces after it’s done, gets loaded onto the trailer, and leaves. Who would’ve thought boring could get this exciting? Check the photo gallery for a diagram of the procedure.
But this is the boring part of tunneling. The challenging part is how fast it can be done. Well, slower than surface traffic, that’s for sure. In fact, slower than a snail. Not but a tiny bit, but “4-5 times slower than a garden snail” – 0.03 mph (0.048 kph), if you’re devastated by curiosity. Well, Prufrock’s design allows it to dig faster than one mile per week.
And that’s just the first ambition of Musk’s underground operation machinery; after it will surpass that velocity, the boring equipment’s next target is human-pace speed, albeit fractional: seven miles per day. That’s a massive leap in efficiency – Stage 2 Prufrock should be 49 times faster than the current model. How is that achievable? By tripling the power, putting the TBM (tunnel-boring machine) on rubber wheels rather than rails (the industry standard at this time), and reinforcing the tunnel with precast segments while the drilling is underway.
The last step mentioned above is critical for thrusting the work onto a superior speed category. The widespread contemporary practice is to stop the drilling operation and put the supporting arches in the tunnel, then resume boring, stop again, put arches, and so on. The utterly dreary part of what I just described is that it is done every five feet (in soft-soil horizontal mining).
Photo: The Boring Company
Another dragging part of the tunneling business is the fact that the machines are typically lowered to and raised from tunnel level through vertical shafts (dug separately). Prufrock doesn’t need that, it simply tilts down, starts boring his way until it reaches the desired depth, digs horizontally, then points its drills upwards and exists. Elon Musk's video tweet at the bottom of the story shows the final stage of the tunneling process.
One more – predictable, I would say – paradigm-changing concept from The Boring Company is to use electric-powered equipment for the mining process. It might not sound like a drastic improvement, but it makes tons of difference. “Tunnel construction with all-electric tunneling equipment, liner truck included, results in a cleaner tunnel with simpler ventilation requirements due to the lack of diesel fumes.”
After nearly two decades in news television, Răzvan turned to a different medium. He’s been a field journalist, a TV producer, and a seafarer but found that he feels right at home among petrolheads. Full profile
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