Recently, reporters visited the production workshop of China Railway No.4 Engineering Group Anhui Intelligent Manufacturing Company (hereinafter Anhui Segment Factory), rows of industrial robots were flexibly swinging their mechanical arms, performing cleaning, surface-smoothing and spraying tasks on the shield-segment production line — resembling a highly coordinated “special forces” unit.

Zhao Guoqiang, deputy director of the engineering department, pointed to the operating machines and explained, “The cleaning robots automatically remove molds and dust, the smoothing robots achieve high-precision automated leveling, and the spraying robots deliver uniform, no-dead-angle coatings — freeing workers from dirty and physically demanding tasks.” He said workers’ focus has shifted to equipment management, maintenance and optimization, achieving an upgrade from “operators” to “technical supervisors.”

This transformation originated from the construction requirements of a key transportation infrastructure project in the country’s 14th Five-Year Plan — the Ma’anshan Hubei Road Yangtze River crossing. To meet the project’s extremely high demands for shield segments, Anhui Segment Factory completed an intelligent modernization over four months, overcoming the challenge of mass-producing ultra-large-diameter 14.5-meter shield segments.

“Intelligent upgrading was not achieved overnight,” said factory director Wang Jinlong. Through persistent efforts, the team ultimately broke through core technologies such as millimeter-level precision control for ultra-large-diameter segments and intelligent curing of large-volume concrete to prevent cracking, fully upgrading traditional production into a standardized intelligent process.

With the intelligent transformation now complete, Anhui Segment Factory formally established mass-production capability for ultra-large-diameter shield segments in early November. In the shield-tunnel industry, segment diameter is a hard measure of a company’s technical strength. This breakthrough has propelled the factory into the country’s top tier of segment manufacturers, raising annual capacity to 200,000 cubic meters — an 18% increase over pre-upgrade levels.

The factory will custom-produce nearly 3,000 rings of ultra-high-precision segments for the Ma’anshan river-crossing project. These segments, praised as the tunnel’s “strong armor,” strictly follow exacting standards of “ultra-high precision, ultra-strong load-bearing, and century-long durability,” providing a solid guarantee for the tunnel’s safety over a hundred years. As the longest Yangtze River tunnel in Anhui Province, once completed it will strongly support deeper integration and coordinated development between Anhui and the core Yangtze River Delta region, accelerating Ma’anshan’s competitive and cooperative advantages in the region.

Source: anhuinews.com