First-line investigation： How to build a chain of shield machines in China？

Shield machine is called "the king of construction machinery" and is an important symbol to measure the manufacturing level of a country. Today, seven out of every ten shield machines in the world come from China. What kind of industrial chain support is behind this? Look at the reporter’s first-line research.

In the assembly workshop of China Railway Equipment, the largest shield machine enterprise in China, the reporter saw that a number of shield machines exported overseas were being delivered centrally. If this shield machine is disassembled, there are more than 10 thousand parts. As can be seen from this industrial chain map, cutters and main bearings are mainly concentrated in Henan, motors are mainly located in Shanxi, and gears are mainly distributed in the Yangtze River Delta and Chongqing. And if we go back to 10 years ago, these key components still have to rely on imports.

Cutters, like teeth, determine the tunneling speed of a shield machine. The materials used as cutters should be high in hardness, corrosion resistance, good in flexibility and fatigue resistance. In order to overcome this special material, China Railway Equipment and Tsinghua University jointly tackle key problems, and conducted thousands of tests on more than a dozen additive elements, finally solving the problem of high strength and toughness of superhard materials.

As the "chain length" in the industrial chain, China Railway Equipment has driven the development of more than 1,200 enterprises through this collaborative innovation mechanism for many years. In this warehouse, the reporter saw that there were fifty or sixty rows of shelves with accessories such as motors and hydraulic pumps, just like a "parts supermarket for shield machines". Now more than 160 local enterprises provide supporting products and services for shield machines.

At the same time, engineers are constantly promoting the renewal and upgrading of shield machines. The types of shield machines have increased from two 10 years ago to 15 now. Originally, they can only move horizontally, but now they can go up and down slopes, turn corners and operate vertically. Now, the shield machine in China is still developing towards intellectualization and "unmanned tunneling".

Thanks to China’s complete industrial chain and continuous iterative technological innovation, today, China’s shield machine has occupied 70% of the global market, with thousands of upstream and downstream enterprises. Only China Railway Equipment and shield machines have received more than 1,600 orders, which have been exported to more than 30 countries and regions around the world, ranking first in the world in terms of production and sales for six consecutive years.