Sure you can improve the traditional TBM, but are theses improvement are needed?
Most of us here come from the software world, where sure improvement are costly (still less than in the physical world), but they can also target a huge market for a pretty cheap price.
Who actually need it to be 10 times faster? It takes already a pretty long time just to put in place a project, would it matters if you just saved a few months because the tunnel was bored faster? Sure in some situation, 10 times faster could be useful, but would theses situations be ready to pay the cost to develop that? Why not buying 10 TBM instead? That would even be more flexible.
Sure you can improve the traditional TBM, but are theses improvement are needed?
Most of us here come from the software world, where sure improvement are costly (still less than in the physical world), but they can also target a huge market for a pretty cheap price.
Who actually need it to be 10 times faster? It takes already a pretty long time just to put in place a project, would it matters if you just saved a few months because the tunnel was bored faster? Sure in some situation, 10 times faster could be useful, but would theses situations be ready to pay the cost to develop that? Why not buying 10 TBM instead? That would even be more flexible.