TUM Boring: 70 Students Build the World's Fastest Tunnel Boring Machine

HAOKUN ZHENG: All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to my talk, TUM Boring -- Building the Worlds Fastest TBM. My name is Hoakun Zheng. And I'm a co-founder of Project Lead and chairman of TUM Boring. TUM Boring is the student initiative of the Technical University of Munich. And as the name and also the description already says, we are students dedicated to building a tunnel boring machine. And we competed in Not-a-Boring Competition 2021. And our journey, and our story, and the time, and sweat that we have spent on this throughout the last-- since the project's inception in July 2020, 14 months ago, that's sort of the journey I would like to share with you in the next couple of minutes.

Some short information on me, I'm 20 years old, currently studying computer science. It's my undergrad degree for a bachelor's degree at the Technical University of students-- Technical University of Munich. And I co-founded Project Lead, and I'm the chairman of TUM Boring. And if you have any questions, if you have any follow up topics that you want to talk about, feel free to reach out to me at any time. I will freely provide information that is all around. And yeah, that should probably be everything you know. We're really looking forward to sharing our story with you.

We start off, however, with a general introduction into our topic. As I said, we're a student initiative that is working on tunnel boring machines. Tunnel boring machines themselves, they are more or less a small niche machine in the engineering industry. However, the problem that we're actually facing and also the idea and our motivation for this project's drive-- is coming from a way bigger point. We're talking about tunneling and tunnels in the context of infrastructure.

And if you look at infrastructure, there is a big problem developing currently in the world. It's also getting even worse. And that is that throughout the world, the urbanization is keeping-- going on. And we have a lot of urban population density increases that we can see and observe. And with that, you know that as cities are getting bigger and bigger, the population density grows. The room and living space can go three-dimensionally, which means we can technically build buildings higher and higher and higher.

So we have the actual volume to fill those people onto the street and in the central grid It is only limited, until this point, to a modest two-dimensional plane, which, if you do the math, really tells you, or you can therefore see, that this will not work on the long term. And we can already observe traffic problems and traffic congestion that is an all-time peak right now. As the fact states, Los Angeles residents usually spend almost seven full days just sitting in traffic per year. That is obviously not something that is desirable.

With that in mind, our student interest is really taking care of-- I'm taking care and I'm interested in maybe improving and also revolutionizing urban mobility concepts. And also thinking, tunnels, in that context, are one option, which could basically help us out in mitigating the really high congestion in the streets that we have, and also help out with server infrastructure capacity. And so this is what we were really motivated about, and this is also why we participated in Not-a-Boring Competition 2021, which I'll get about-- or talk about to you in just a second. Just some more information on actually why tunnel infrastructure might be important.

I already stated the three-dimensional idea of having-- also not only the three-dimensional living spaces, but also three-dimensional infrastructure so that you wouldn't be able or you wouldn't be limited to just a planar two-dimensional surface. But thermal roof tunnels would be able to go into the ground. So you have technically a whole new degree of freedom, where you could place and also use capacity for infrastructure. And with that said, tunnels can also relieve existing street infrastructure, and therefore, especially in city sectors, maybe even reduce or transfer street surface to actual power screen areas, thereby reducing soil sealing.

And last but not least, tunnels enable us to give us way more concise, precise, and also direct routes. The street is never-- or it's always limited by the surrounding that it's being built in. A tunnel however, technically speaking, is able to go through the route directly. And with new, crazy, and interesting mobility concepts, such as Hyperloop, tunnels really provide a base for that part to be giving them the necessary runway, and also the strength, and also the straightway between cities in a straight line-- that's really what I'm meaning-- to be able to maybe realize such concepts.

And since we're talking Hyperloop, they're supposed to be pods going around for over 800 miles per hour. And then you need a pretty straight line, which is really hard to do with streets on the surface. That's just a small introduction into tunnel infrastructure.

I actually want to get into our team itself. And what we're doing we are competing as a team in Not-a-Boring Competition 2021. Now, as you can maybe tell, this is related and this competition is organized by the Boring Company, which is owned by Elon Musk. This competition was announced in July 2020.

And the challenge that was given to all students around the world was design and build a tunnel boring machine that bores tunnels faster than a snail crawls. That's a lot of words. Basically, you were supposed to design a machine which is faster than the industry standard. And a snail is actually pretty quick. A snail can actually crawl around 3 meters or 9 feet per minute. And a tunnel boring machine in the day-- in this day, they may be able to dig a meter or 3 feet of tunnel in 5 to 8 hours, depending on the geology.

With that said, the challenge of the competition challenged us to build a tunnel boring machine which is capable of boring this-- a 30-meter long tunnel with a 500 millimeter diameter. And the tunnel should have reached or must reach a minimum depth of 1.5 meters or 5 feet. The fastest team to complete the tunnel wins. And how we managed to do that, and also how-- where we stood in that competition, that is the story that I'll be telling you throughout the next couple of minutes.

I want to give you a short introduction about our actual team first. So you can see our-- probably to you it's quite familiar-- Zoom call sessions in the background. We are a team of 60 people, and it's really impressive if you look at the numbers. We're over 60 people from students all around Munich. There are actually three universities in our project involved. Our average age is 24. We're undergrads as well as graduates in our project. And we're all doing this voluntarily on a voluntary basis.

With our 60 people-plus team, they are more than 16 faculties from the Munich area represented. And so we have a variety of different disciplines taking part in our project. And in total, we were founded in July 2020, and therefore 14 months passed at the time of recording, from project inception until the actual competition. We are extremely well supported as well and situated at the Technical University of Munich. Our project patron is actually the president of the Technical University of Munich. And furthermore, we've also received great support from the industry.

And this is just one more example of how we actually situated and how we're funded. And as you can see, we're working with a lot of corporate industry partners, including Autodesk, which is why I'm holding this talk right now. Autodesk has been really helpful with a lot of things, not only software speaking. We've been using Fusion 360 as our CAD base. And it's been really helpful in designing our machinery. Furthermore, Autodesk is helping us a lot financially as well as through just general advice and also manufacturing of parts.

And so we are a actually pretty big team if you consider a student initiative being 60 plus people. However, we needed that much to achieve what we were able to do, and that is something that I wanted to talk about your next. With that said, however, we are situated in the area as well. And one more thing that is also really interesting in our special situation as a team is that the TUM, the TUM, the Technical University of Munich, has already had a lot of student teams competing in similar competitions by Elon Musk, mainly the Hyperloop-- SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competitions, where we were able, as a university, to win four of four competitions.

With that said, we're now the follow up team, more or less, to be competing in the new competition after Hyperloop is not being-- the competition for Hyperloop are not being held anymore. And this is why we are extremely grateful for the generous high media attention as well that we've been receiving. And just to give you an idea, we have been covered by all major German newspapers. And it's a really high-stakes project. We're not compared to or compared to maybe the regular student initiatives. We're actually-- I'm thinking maybe running the country.

We actually are operating more almost like a medium-sized business or small-sized business. It's been a really interesting time last year. And all our 60 people are doing this full-time. They've put aside studies. And so this is a really high performance, highly motivated, highly passionate team. But I'm trying to share a story with you. All right. We are competing in Not-a-Boring Competition. And with Not-a-Boring Competition, you obviously need one thing, obviously you're competing machinery.

And it's just what I wanted to introduce to you next. Our machine is a tunnel boring machine. And to give you a general idea of how we're situated, we have spent almost six months designing and engineering this. And since we are a German-based team, we actually were thinking and we were relying on sea freight in order to get our machinery, which is not the lightest thing in the world, over to the US to be able to compete in the competition finals in Las Vegas.

And here you can see a general top-level view of our machinery that we're doing in the tunnel boring machine, which means in the front-- I'm just going through the subsystems. In the front, you have the cutterhead, which is responsible for basically scraping off the dirt of the ground, and then that will be dropped into the tube onto the conveyor through an auger screw. Then, the conveyor takes out that dirt, and then they dump it in the back wide trail, which you can see there, which is then being dumped outside of the container.

The two segments, or the tunnel segments-- those are wide, long tubes as you can see. And in the front, where the person is standing, we have our so-called pipe thruster, which is basically our tracking system. If you're familiar with tunnel boring, there's a lot different technologies that you can use. We optimize for, obviously, maximum-- or we optimize for the speed of the tunneling process, which is why we use for that diameter, this so-called pipe tracking method. This means that instead of-- maybe you are familiar with that concept-- building the tunnel as we go while the tunnel boring machine advances, we actually have our entire tunnel pre-manufactured.

And we have a really strong tracking system of the front, the clamps that grabs the tunnel and pushes it into the dirt. And I'll go over that system in just a couple of minutes. But besides that, on the back, we have our stored pipes, or tunnels. And everything is encased in the shipping container so that we able to ship this on a ship. And on the back, we have a hydraulic powerpack. The total of this thing is really massive. Rendering it looks pretty cool, but actually in person, this is even more impressive.

We were talking about 22 tons of machinery. The entire container is a 40-foot that, so we're talking 12 meter in length. And the entire machine consumes up to 100 kilowatts of power. All right. And we'll just go through the different subsystems to give you a better idea. In the front, we have our cutterhead. We have a peak torque of up to 10,000 Newton meters at 30 RPM. Those are provided by [? four-arm ?] motors, those synchronous motors which we've put at the bottom. And as you can see on the right side, we have a cutter and a cutter wheel in front.

That one is responsible for taking off and scraping off all kinds of material that is the front of the tunnel boring machine or to be able to push a tunnel through the ground. After that material has been scraped off, it will be falling into the chamber in the center, where an auger screw is responsible, as you can see in the bottom, in taking out the actual material and dropping it on to the conveyor. We'll be following up as this segment down here will be connected to the first actual pipe. The entire drivetrain is electrically powered, and we're able to-- it is consuming up to, I believe, 22 kilowatts.

Then, the jacking is simple, the pipe thruster that I was talking about-- actually, this thing is really massive. It weighs probably something like 8 or 9 tons. And it's really impressive. We have two clamps, each-- of them able to produce up to 50 metric tons of pushing force. We're working with hydraulic. Probably like running it at 250 bar and really heavy duty cylinders. And that increases or produces results and a total pushing force of up to 100 metric tons.

We are also able to achieve a feed rate of 1 meter per minute, which means that our jacking clamps are able, while grabbing the tube, to extend 1 meter per minute. So that is pretty fast as well. And during engineering, we felt the decision-- we made the decision to go from two clamps instead of one big one. Because those two clamps with 50 metric tons of pushing force each allow us to have a continuous tunneling process.

So if you can imagine, we'll be driving both asynchronously or opposite to each other, depending on-- or regarding where they stand. So while the first front pipe tracking checking system clamp will, for example, be extending and pushing the tube into, the real one will actually be retracting. Before the front one actually reaches its maximum extension length, the rear one will be engaging the pipe. And so we'll have a continuous motion of the pipe.

And just a short overview into our tunnel segments itself as well, we have 55 meters of conveyor belts in total covering the entire length of the 30-meter tunnel. We have-- while 55 meters, the tunnel itself is 32 meters long. The requirement is 30 meters. However, we have conveyor belts as well on the bottom of the container and also on the outside of the container to be able to dump material. These conveyor belts have been chosen because of their really high material flow rates.

We are able to actually carry up 8 kilograms per second of material out of the tunnel. If you know tunnel boring machines. So they're closed [INAUDIBLE]. There's also other systems that you can use. For example, certain machines use-- so-called server machines use wet excavation, which means that they'll be mixing the material that they're excavating out of the ground with some sort of conditioned fluids, also water. However, that material flow will definitely not result-- will not definitely be that high as we optimize our machinery for the competition, which means being able to tunnel as fast as possible.

We have used basically almost the entire diameter of the tunnel for conveyor belts, and they are in total four-- in the tunnel segments, they will be four tunnel segments, and they are being placed on the driving surfaces. Going back to the actual whole system overview-- and just we'll run you one more time through the actual tunneling process. We have our cutterhead in front with [INAUDIBLE] material that will be dumped through-- onto the conveyor belts in the actual tunnel segments. Once the jacking system has pushed out one entire tube segments, the revolver in the back of the pipe storage, will be rotating 90 degrees.

And then we'll have our next tube ready. So in total, this is a really optimized process for speed. Now, this is our machine that we have designed more or less within six months, I believe, or even less, I think four months. And it's been purely done by students. We have no real industry experts in our team that have done tunnel boring machines before. However, it's really exciting to be able to say that students were able to create this. And this are renderings, but I promise I have also pictures of the back of this machinery.

This is what we competed with at the competition. And for our general project timeline, also general overview of what we've been doing, this is what we'll be talking about in the second half of this talk. I just wanted to give you an impression of what we've been doing. In July 2020, our project was founded. We started the design phase. We recruited our team members. We drew to a team of 60 people pretty quickly. And then, until February 2021, we were designing. We were sitting in Fusion the entire day.

We were sitting in Zoom calls and meetings and thinking of how we will be willing to tackle-- or how we want to tackle the challenge of the competition. And then back in February 2021, we already started the assembly. That was the really interesting part, because now we could get away from our screens. We stopped doing CAD. We started actually going into the construction halls and started manufacturing and assembling our machine, which was really impressive because of all-- the heavy duty parts. And then we did that until May 2021 until we actually started testing.

With such a high complexity system as well as a student team, as they're doing this for maybe the first time, you always need a lot of testing and also checking, making sure that all the systems that you were planning with using in certain ways are actually functioning in that way. And during that testing, which was already really nice, we were already able to successfully dig a 30-meter long test tunnel. And with that being done in August 2020, we started moving over and shipped our container out to the US via sea freight.

That was a whole big operation, but we made it. And we shipped it first of all to Houston where we had another two weeks of working on our machine construction, or upgrading it, checking and running system checks, procedure tests and everything until we then finally on September 12th arrived-- or competed in the competition here in Las Vegas by the Boring Company. And on September 4th and 5th, we arrived with our machine here in Las. Vegas

At the time of recording, actually fun fact, this is why also my voice may sound a bit scratchy-- we are one day out where yesterday basically was September 12th, which means that I have had less than 12 hours hearing the news that we actually won the competition. All right. Then, I will just like to talk to you or take you throughout our journey on how we project this. I've given you a bit of an impression of what we actually did. You've seen our machine. You've seen our product stats.

But actually, I believe what is the most valuable out of this talk and also maybe the most interesting is just to see one example of how this project, or how a project like this, is actually being operated, how this works, and how this grew up. And so we started right at the beginning with the product conception. Back then, we were really just a couple of students. I believe we were at the beginning 5 and then we grew to 10 people who were just engineering enthusiasts. We knew about [INAUDIBLE]. We knew about the average success of successful teams at TUM.

And we thought, hey, this competition sounds really hard but also really interesting. So we started sitting together and did some stuff. One of our co-founders, he actually built a small tunnel boring machine in his free time. So he was really into tunnel boring machines already before. That machine-- we finished that as a project, as a small hands on project or prototype to figure out what our tunnel boring machine actually aim is.

What we-- or with that machine, we actually were able to take a 2-meter tunnel in the first place as well. And so that was really a kickoff of our project. That was from July to August 2020. Until we then decided, OK, this tunnel boring project is really interesting. We want to do that. It's really cool. It's engineeringly speaking really tricky to be able to produce a tunnel boring machine with a 50 centimeter diameter, which is able to dig the 30 meter long tunnel.

But this topic and this field really interest us. So we thought, OK, let's try to win this competition. And then we started recruiting. We grew up to a 60 people team in almost no time. The interest at TUM, especially with Tom Hoffman, was huge. And we've gotten a lot of different talented and motivated people into our team, and that was really nice. And so while that was happening obviously, we are still aware of that and maybe still living that-- the global pandemic was going on. March 2021-- 2020 was probably the day that everyone has in mind for the world's longest shutdown.

And in July, and August, September, that was no different in Germany. So as you can probably see on these different photos and impressions, Zoom screens, meetings through Zoom, through however online videoconferencing was [INAUDIBLE] center. And so this is how we actually got to know each other in the first place with 60 people obviously not being able to meet at the same time in Germany. And it was a really fun time though, because everyone was already used and also tired of being in actual classes.

And so getting to equally enthusiastic and also passionate people with this topic, and actually being interested in technology and being in this competition, that was really a nice thing. And then on the right, you can see basically an example of how we started working together. We started doing actual CADing of our machine, engineering and constructing it, and thinking about how we would want to design our systems. That said, that was really just on screen or in front of screen time. So we just pulled up some really nice statistics, which we also had back then.

We had, in total over 20, tunnel boring members who were working more or less on Fusion 360 full-time on a full basis, on a daily basis. In total, that net us-- pretty crazy, I believe-- over 6,500 community hours that were spent on Fusion 360 since September 2020. And in the graph below, you can actually see where those hours are distributed. And funny enough, regarding project timelines, we had different deadlines, which we had to follow up in order to be submitting certain checkpoints and also certain design packages to the Boring Company in order to prove that we're still on track in order to qualify for the further steps in the competition.

And during those peaks, you can see those were pretty hard times. We spend a ton of sleepless nights figuring out how we will be designing stuff and basically making sure that everything would work out. And funny fact-- maybe also out of the graph, you can tell that way back, where it says exams, actually, that was, I believe, in February as well as March of 2021.

That was when university exams kicked in, so you can also tell their activity went a bit down. Nonetheless, we spend the time [INAUDIBLE] Fusion 360. Got to know it pretty well. That's also why Autodesk is such a fitting, you know, company and also [? Eric ?] will be talking about this project with us. And a total [INAUDIBLE] over I believe. 10,000 parts and it's just crazy we have the entire assembly in Fusion 360.

It was really helpful having 360 on hands. We've been using-- especially since we've all been working remotely together-- with all features, being able to collaborate through the cloud and also not having to set up a vault or anything else. That was really helpful. And we spent basically four months until February/March 2021 sitting in front of a computer thinking and scratching our heads on how we would tackle the competition problem-- the competition problem statement-- or to be able to do this.

Finally, after almost what felt like an eternity in that county [INAUDIBLE] just sitting in front of the computer screen, we were able to start assembly. After we determined the systems, we designed everything we drew-- everything together, we ordered parts, and then one of our corporate partners in Munich lent us the space and their construction hall. So we were more motivated to be able to get out and actually start assembly.

So you have some more impressions on here. You saw the renderings before and now you actually have a real-life equivalent. On the top left you see our container when it arrived. And the top bottom-- not the top-- the bottom left, you see the tube segments, which we have. We have one tube just for testing and also as an extra in case anything broke and the variety [INAUDIBLE] conveyors, which will be then fitted into the tubes.

Variety-- you see one of those checking traps. Those checking traps are extremely heavy. They don't look like that, but they weigh around 200 to 300 kilograms, which is around 600/700 pounds. It's crazy to just have them delivered and then suddenly understand. OK, this is some real forces as well as real power that we're playing around with when we're talking about our tunnel boring machine.

Assembly took on-- or took almost three months. We have been rotating through our 60-people team. In order to be able to do that, as already said, we were working full time, which means that actually, as we have so many committed and passionate stewards in our team that we actually all put aside our studies-- or mostly put aside for studies-- in order to then be able to match the tight really, really crazily tight deadlines that the competition put on us.

Because building tunnel boring machine within probably-- or assembling even-- not even talking about construction time. But assembling a tunnel boring machine, you know, time spent from February until September 2021-- and that is, in total, seven months. That is at least what our industry corporate partners told us. The insane and also crazy impossible. We tried to pull off impossible. We arguably did. But, yeah, that was really interesting, hard times that we spent in the shop trying to get our machine ready. But also really interesting.

After we actually were able to assemble a machine-- you can see a really nice shot of our finished machine on the container trailer-- we moved to our test site, which was in the north of Munich where we actually started trying to play around in the dirt-- dig our first tunnel, figure out over everything that we have thought about so far in theory, but actually also work in practice. And so that was also a really interesting time.

Another thing of the test site was the whole operation by itself. Really, really cool. We had entire test set up two containers. We have a second container that is going-- that came with us, to the US, actually is a freight container because we have so many tools and all kinds of other spare parts. But right. Just a really beautiful shot of our pipe structure and both were actually fully assembled. And so that is something that as [INAUDIBLE] look into the machine that we have been testing our machine then.

And our gravel pit, which was supplied to us. And the left, you to see some more pics of our actual kind of [INAUDIBLE] now fully assembled. You maybe recognize that from [INAUDIBLE] that I showed you before. And on the left, actually, the front segments of the tunnel boring machine. Not really an action project, but close to being an action. Close to before being pushed into the ground.

On the right, you see one of our cutter head members being really happy about us having all kinds of different cutter heads. We have been experimenting with geology. A vital part of actual testing is also figuring out OK, what kind of geology are we facing? How well is the machine dealing with that sort of geology with the respective cutter wheel that you have mounted? So we're trying to optimize our own test, but also optimize our tunneling speed during that time.

That was also the first time, actually, where we were able to come together almost as a whole team. If you remember correctly, we've been sitting in front of our computer screens mostly until February 2021. And then during February 2021, during assembly, we got together and got to know each other a bit, but really hadn't had the chance to do any group meetups, do any group photos, or just have a big get-together. Those were mainly just shift works, which means we were working in shifts, which means that OK, we always have maybe 20 people working on the machine max, not more.

However, during summer, the restrictions were eased and we were finally able to not only witness the testing of our machine, but furthermore also just get together as a team. Really see each other, not really for the first time, for longer periods together. And this is also where the team bond really happens. A really nice experience. And during that time, as you can see from the bottom left-- as well as right shot-- we were able to dig our tunnels.

We use some dirt and gravel and compressed that down [INAUDIBLE] to simulate the geology that we'll be facing here in Las Vegas. And we're pretty lucky-- also successful-- that no major systems broke. We're really excited and also just thrilled to see that our tunnel boring machine actually cleared 30 meters in total. And how the tunneling process looks. I hope that those pictures in the bottom right left illustrate that.

After not completing our testing and figuring out that machine actually works, we qualified for the finals in Las Vegas. And that was, I believe, in March. No actually, we qualified for finals after submitting our final design. So we only submitted a theory-- a theoretical machine design, which then qualified us for finals in Las Vegas. However, after actually proving that our machine was working, we were cleared for entry, which means that at some point in August, I believe it was-- no, before August-- July 20, we had to say goodbye to our-- both containers. Our machine container-- freight container. And we shipped them off via sea freight to Houston in the US.

And in the back you see our machine arrives in Houston. We had a small team of 18 people receiving the machine in Houston. We also had corporate partners sponsoring us in the construction hall over there. And so we used-- or we had another two weeks of time in order to actually conduct more upgrades on the machine, make sure that after the sea freight-- it'd be four weeks on sea-- the machine was still functional and do some procedure testings.

And so this is what we've been doing in Houston. You can see on the top left, actually, the full tunnel length laid out. So 30 meters is actually pretty long, at least for a student team like us. Maybe not for the Houston-- the general engineer that is working on a tunnel boring company, because we're digging tunnels up to, I don't know, 10 kilometers' length. But for a student team being able to-- and also having to handle that kind of proper weight-speaking. And also just like size-speaking, that was really impressive.

On the left, you see a shot-- a point of view shot, actually, from one of the tunnels that's being fed into the tracking system. So you can tell there's like two areas, black parts and components. Those are actually the like grip paths, which will be gripping the tunnel and pushing it forward into the open. On the right, you see some work-- the conveyor belts. Just to give you some more impressions. Also ideas about different subsystems. Here are some detailed shots.

Yeah. This was the construction hall which we had. It was really nice. We had two cranes in the hall, which we were able to use and that was really helpful. We basically also done a lot of software during that time and just got our machine ready for the competition in September. And here. One more shot-- actually us going through another 30-meter test. This time without any dirt or geology. We just went through a procedure testing and figuring out, OK, is the entire machine still ready to dig tunnel, and is everything-- every connection working together and stuff.

That was probably-- the entire Houston time was actually-- I'm calling it Houston time. Basically, our time in Houston, this construction hall, was probably one of the most exhaustive periods of this project as we've been really working almost 16 hours a day to get everything ready, to finish everything, to get everything cleared for the upcoming safety briefings by the competition organizers. And those were really like the time where-- that was really the time that we actually got the machine ready, when we were able to say, OK, the machine is now finally able to tunnel. No matter what comes. And that was pretty intense time.

After now having spent more or less 10 months preparing for everything, the-- not not ten months, actually like 13 months-- preparing everything, our machine, at some, point finally then arrived to Vegas. We shipped the machine off from Houston on September 4th, and it arrived on September 5th in Vegas. And that's just a shot you can see in the background.

We were finally in Vegas here for the competition week, which was from September 6th until 12th, with 12th being the actual competition day, where every the tunnel boring machine was being tested and we had to compete with the other teams. And at that time, everyone was extremely exhausted but also really excited to be finally Vegas. We have a big crowd right next to the strip and also right next to the airport. That was our competition site. And we, as a Technical University-- Technical University of Munich team, were actually on site with almost 50 people, which is definitely-- which was definitely the largest team size.

And that was a crazy time as well. Those five days-- when we arrived, you see a shot of us finally putting our container into the actual pit and being able to finally align it for the final tunnel-boring process. And that is something that I'll be showing you next. That was really exciting. After a week long set up, we were able to then finally set up our machine for tunneling on September 12th-- yesterday, actually, at the time of recording-- we were allowed to actually-- and we were cleared to start tunneling, which we did.

It was really exciting when our machine started digging into the ground. And not really a lot of problems. Luckily, one [? must ?] [? say. ?] And on the right, you see our operators trying to keep an eye on all systems, making sure that everything is running as it's supposed to be doing. And after working continuously-- you can see some impressions, how the machine actually works in the dirt. At the back, you have the pipe storage, you have the material being dumped, people working on the conveyor belts-- because we had a small system failure there because they were clogging up-- and then just how the machine was operating.

The entire digging process took around six hours to get through 30 meters. But also a pretty hard geology. Nonetheless, it was really interesting. You can see some kind of shots and impressions from how we progressed. There's a lot of video and other material still coming up. Again, this talk is being recorded at the time. One day after the competition.

But the first initial impressions, you can see here-- you can see some progress throughout the tunnels-- throughout the tunneling process, which-- on left top, you see us. We just turned the pipe storage 90 degrees, and that's why there's one empty space for a tunnel segment that is already on the ground. Then on the right, you see OK, we've done one more pipe change. And then at the bottom, when it was already evening, we were done with our tunneling.

We were almost done with our tunneling with more pipe. Being-- we were all about to be [? tired. ?] And then, after finally six hours of hard work, tunneling, sitting in the sun, spending 14 months working on this project-- this really, crazy project-- it was crazily expensive. Crazily time-expensive. Crazily-- amazing experience. We're called up and the competition was closed up. And there was award ceremony, and TUM Boring was able to secure the first place.

We were competing with 12 other teams. At the finals, eight of them were actually on site. And only two of them were cleared to dig a tunnel because they always had struggles with their systems. And so after the entire year of struggling, we were able to secure the win. I don't know if you can tell, but there's a trophy at the bottom, yeah, center left being held up. And that was probably the biggest relief moment that we ever had. This project has been a crazy year that we spent as students together. But it was a really, really amazing. And something like this is definitely something I will do again.

And this is where we stand right now. I'm standing here currently still in Las Vegas. Currently in my hotel room. And talking to you. It's a bit of a pity that we can see each other in person. I know AU is usually held in Las Vegas, but given the pandemic situation, obviously it's not necessarily possible. However, I believe that some project like this-- and I hope that a story like this was really maybe inspiring to you.

And at the end of our story, I just have a couple more learnings. Some, maybe, thoughts to keep in mind. Something to figure out. What did we actually learn from this project space? So much we learned. If I would be starting to list all of that stuff, we would be done by maybe next week. But the main important things that I believe, which is maybe applicable than only student projects, student teams, whatever-- but actually through everyday life for everyone, is to never underestimate the power of passion.

If you think about that, we were a 60-people team doing this all for free, voluntarily in our free time. Leisure time. Who, with the right mindset would-- what kind of person do you have to be to do that? Right, put aside your studies. And I believe the real driving factor-- besides like, obviously being students and not necessarily having too many responsibilities compared to maybe you working at a job or something is actually a [? profession. ?]

The idea that someone is really interested and passionate about something. And that really, if you're passionate and motivated or something, there is nothing that you can't achieve. We've been told by industry-leading companies about tunnel boring that this will be impossible to achieve. This will be impossible to pull off in time. Nonetheless, we have prevailed. We built this. And in the end, if you just look at the entire grand picture, the only driving force that you can name is the motivation and passion.

And so if you have ever-- if you ever have a product working on something, if you've ever had a specific small, small, small project/team going on, never underestimate passionate motivation. And try to especially enforce-- not enforce, but like, advancement-- push that in order to then maybe push for the boundaries of what you would be perceiving as possible.

Every single individual, every one out of the 60-people team. I'm so thankful to be able to be working with them. That's been crazy. And really having such a passionate team-- also, when you're looking at who to work with, I think that has been really the main pushing force for this really nice working atmosphere where we currently have our team. And another thing that's actually what really helped us out, I think, the development of and deployment of remote working tools.

So obviously, as students, we're a bit more tech savvy, maybe as some other people-- as young people, maybe arguably a bit more tech savvy than maybe older people or whatever-- nonetheless, being able to leverage our-- also split our time effectively. Figuring out what to do with our time and being able to collaborate with Fusion 360, for example, in the cloud, that has helped us a lot.

And also saves a lot of time, basically. If you would imagine us having to commute to every single small meeting or whatever, then that would have taken so much more time. So being able to have the right deployment of remote working tools. That was really a good thing that we did. We were lucky enough, I must say, that we were all tech savvy enough to be able to handle all kinds of different tools and coordinate with each other.

We are living in a time where collaborating with people all around the world-- at which time we had, I believe in total, five members. And living in I think time zones-- in total, apart of around 22 hours or something. Being able to communicate around the world has not been easier than ever before and it's the easiest right now. And so being able to do that in an efficient way. That definitely also helped us.

Just some more insights than that. Then just as a final thought, we believe the world needs more projects like this. We as students are used to sitting in a lecture hall. We as students are sitting in-- used to writing exams and just learning everything in the old way. But this project has given us so many different learnings, has done so much in terms of soft skills, in terms of being able to work together between teams and team members. Different people. Different disciplines. And how do you manage your team like that?

Everything, starting from the soft skills as well as, actually, the hands-on experience on engineering speaking-- or engineering-wise speaking-- but also furthermore, management-wise speaking, financials, bureaucratics. All of that stuff is not really being taught in the school in the same way. And you can't really teach that unless you start a project like this. So if you're thinking of a possibility-- or if you have a possibility to be part of the Hansel project, if you have the possibility to maybe a project like this, or launch a competition, whatever.

Feel free to do that. I believe that this is the most valuable thing that I have so far actually gotten out of my academic education. I am still in my undergrad degree, so there might be something coming ahead. But this past year has been amazing. This past year has taught me more than I could have ever imagined. And if you have a chance to be part of some sort of project like this, no matter what way, I would certainly recommend you participating.

And yeah, I hope that this kind of arc about our story. Our story really about much boring has helped you getting a better look, a better understanding of how kind of projects like this evolve. How do teams at NVM-- and maybe the newspaper actually are running, are operating in the background-- what are they going through and what you can basically take out for yourself into your own applicable field. Help us help you a bit.

And I just want to say thank you for your attention. If you have any questions about our team, any questions about our project, any questions about me or for me, feel free to reach out to me or. Check out our website. There's a ton more material everywhere available online. And with that said, we want to thank you for listening to our story. And I'll thank [INAUDIBLE] also for supporting us. And that's that. I'm looking forward to staying in touch with everyone.