Takitimu North Link
This new four-lane expressway and shared path will improve safety, access, resilience, and provide a greater travel choice whilst connecting Tauranga and Te Puna. The work included three million cubic metres of earthworks, the construction of 8 bridges, including a new bridge crossing at Wairoa River. There are also 29 culverts, 8 stream diversions and 7 wetland areas. A big undertaking with a lot of geotechnical and environmental instrumentation and monitoring.
Problems and Solutions
Providing an instrumentation solution for Takitimu North Link meant we were likely to encounter some challenges, contractors required a robust data management system, to manage all the data coming through.
Some things we needed to consider before progressing:
- Managing a lot of data
- Working with different people from different roles and organisations
- Purpose built for the industry
- Real time, frequently updated data
All instrument data needed to be in one place with real-time updates.
This is where we were able to put ourselves forward with Cirro, which was the ideal method for all people involved. Cirro is designed to pull in data from all of the sensors and instruments out in the field, via New Zealand's cellphone, satellite and loT networks. It slots in well with our existing offering of supply and installation of instrumentation, so we were able to offer the whole package as an end-to-end service.
We needed to make consideration for things like location, what coverage is available, how the hardware needs to be positioned or installed, and tailor the whole solution to meet project specific requirements. Cirro was able to do just that successfully.
Instrumentation used on TNL:
- Piezometers
- Profilmeters
- Inclinometers
- Standpipe Piezometers
Environmental Sensors used on TNL:
- Turbidity Sensors (upstream & downstream)
- Weather stations recording rain, wind, temperature, and humidity.
Cirro Web Interface
Profilometers - settlement readings beneath trial embankment.
VW Piezometers inside of borehole locations: highest pressures in blue, matching trend in green and near surface in black.
Rainfall data from 3 different weather station locations - shown as hourly, with 24 hour and 72 hour rolling totals.
TESTIMONIAL:
“There’s nothing tricky about using it and anyone on the project can jump in and quickly get a clear overview of the site data and identify long term trends. Particularly through the favourites feature, which allows people to setup their own favourite graphs and make them available to other project users. We could speed up the design plan by reacting to information coming out of the site and not overly designing things. Therefore, we were able to save money and time by designing more efficiently. We were also able to mitigate health and safety risk by taking the manual work out of the instrumentation and monitoring program - focusing on consulting and reporting instead."
