Following last year’s successful networking night, we hope that our SRMEG members will once again come together to mingle with one another as well as with invited guests from related fields, and share our common interests. The evening will kick off with an evening lecture on “NATM – A term used so often but, what is it really in the Singapore context?” by Oskar Sigl from Geoconsult Asia Singapore & SRMEG Vice President. 

Date: Friday, 26 January 2018

Venue: Hilton Hotel

Registration: Free for Members

About the Speaker

Dr. Oskar Sigl graduated 1985 from Technical University of Graz, Austria, in Civil Engineering specializing in geotechnics and soil mechanics. In 1991, after working for five years as Teaching Assistant at the Institute for Geomechanics and Tunnelling, he achieved the PhD in mining engineering at the Mining University of Leoben, Austria.

He was involved in the design of major underground structures in a great number of projects, such as subway tunnels, railway and road tunnels, underground storage schemes and caverns. With more than 25 years of tunneling experience, these projects cover a large variety of different ground conditions, foundation and construction methods ranging from hard rock to soft clay and from conventional drill and blast or Cut&Cover excavations to the use of tunnel boring machines and road headers.

Since his arrival in Singapore in 1997, Oskar has been involved in the detailed design of major projects in Singapore including underground constructions along the North East Line, Circle Line and Downtown Line MRTs, the Kallang Payar Lebar and Marine Costal Expressway, the DTSS Project, Cable Tunnels, etc.

Lecture Synopsis

The Term New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) is used so many time but more often than not the users do not fully understand the underlaying principles. Although, it was developed having in mind relatively long tunnels in alpine rock mass conditions with large overburden, its principles, once properly understood can be applied to tunnelling in many other ground conditions as well.

Applying NATM principles in the urban and densely built-up setting in Singapore, however, one need to consider that some of its principles have to be looked at from a different angle and applied in a way suitable to the boundary conditions, especially present in Singapore. Hence, even in Singapore, the term NATM appears every now and then and there are also a few tunnels where the principles have been applied successfully.

The talk will focus again on the main principles of NATM and how they originally came about and then focus on how they are applied in ground conditions, which apparently do not have much similarities with the alpine conditions, which, apart from large overburden, also involves as the main tunnelling medium a geologically relatively young rock mass, which is very variably and tectonically altered.

The presentation will also show a few practical examples explaining the application of NATM to a variety of ground conditions including the ones in Singapore.