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The LHC tunnel is 27km long at an average depth of 100m underneath the French and Swiss countryside. The excavation of the tunnel was Europe's largest civil-engineering project prior to the Channel Tunnel. It is located between the lake of Geneva and the Jura mountains and is dug through different rock: molasse (a sedimentary rock) close to the lake and limestone under the mountain. When completed in 1988 the two ends of the ring came together with just 1cm of error. It is now over 30 years since it was dug and presents an ideal environment in which to monitor the behaviour of tunnels over time.
Engineers at UCC have deployed fibre optic sensors at critical sections of the CERN tunnel to continuously monitor the structural conditions. They are also using deep-learning neural network techniques to automically detect cracks in the tunnel.
This work is part of the Geohazard and Geotechnical Engineering spoke of the SFI-funded iCRAG. It directly informs the long-term stability of Irish infrastructure such as the port-tunnel in Dublin and the Jack Lynch tunnel in Cork.
More information can be found in this short article and presentation.
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