Elon Musk has launched a competition.
Now students from TUM, LMU and HM want to convince the US entrepreneur together with the Erdinger company Huber Technik.
Erding - Elon Musk is one of the great technology and digital drivers of the 21st century.
He invented the Tesla electric car and is considered a co-founder of the PayPal payment system and the space company SpaceX.
The American is currently building a gigantic Tesla factory in Brandenburg.
One of the most recent projects of the high-flyer is of course underground: Musk wants to relieve big cities of traffic with tunnels.
One day his Teslas will even drive autonomously there.
But the driving of widely ramified pipe systems alone is a technical and logistical challenge, especially in densely populated areas.
To this end, the 49-year-old with South African roots has launched a global competition.
And a long-established company from Erdingen plays an important role in this - Huber Technik.
The aim of the competition, as owner Heidi Huber-Kamm describes it, is to develop the fastest and most precise tunnel boring machine - initially as a model.
Students from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) and the University of Munich, who have put together their own team of developers, face this challenge.
Now there is a first stage victory to report: The Munich tinkerers were selected from 400 teams worldwide to take part in the final in the USA with eleven other groups.
But why did Musk launch this competition?
It is about the quick realization of his tunnel vision among large cities.
“The challenge is to develop a tunnel boring machine that drills faster than an auger can crawl in order to bring traffic from the surface into the earth,” explains Huber-Kamm.
“That means investing in a greener world, in a greener future, so that the earth's surface can be used differently.” However, the construction of a tunnel takes a lot of time with large, land-consuming construction sites and costs a lot of money.
To advance a tunnel, however, you not only need a highly specialized and technically sophisticated tunnel boring machine, but also appropriate systems to transport the accumulating material in the form of earth, stones and much more from the interior of the earth to the surface.
And this is where the Erdingen-based company Huber Technik comes into play.
It has long since earned a reputation as a specialist in conveyor belt special machine construction.
The developers from Munich who have joined the TUM Boring - Innovation in Tunneling e.
V. have merged.
Huber-Kamm reports that, among other things, it is the task of the researchers to design a special conveyor technology.
This has been refined to the final version in close cooperation with Tobias Wolf, Head of Design at Huber Technik.
The 60 meter long conveyor belts were manufactured under the direction of Georg Maier, Michael Langer and Franz Petermeier, all three production managers at Huber Technik.
Part of the TUM Boring Team has already inspected the conveyor belts as part of a factory tour at Huber Technik.
The machines are transported to the USA in a container and set up there.
In the presence of Musk, the facility is assessed according to various criteria in the summer and the winner is determined.
"I hope that the team will take one of the top positions with our support," says the boss, who hopes that this will also help her to gain further reputation.
Hans Moritz
