Keeping a Puzzle Together
Sep 1, 2008 — In some ways, excavating rock is the reverse of assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Rock, after all, is not a big monolith. Instead, it’s full of breaks and cracks, discontinuities that can cause problems during tunneling or other excavation. The trick is to keep the assembled pieces from falling apart, a challenge given the three-dimensional nature of the puzzle.
Using a laser scanning system, engineers are mapping the rock surface during excavation for a tunnel bypassing the landslide-prone...