In April, Chengdu, famously known as the “Land of Abundance,” welcomed a vibrant spring. When the reporter visited the earthwork construction site of Chengdu Tianfu International Airport terminal, what stood out was the highly efficient and orderly work environment. Unlike many other construction sites bustling with supervisors and recording staff, here, dozens of large construction machines operated smoothly with minimal human intervention.
According to on-site management, Tianfu Airport currently represents the most complex foundation treatment project in China. The site features numerous ravines and varying ground depths—from just centimeters to tens of meters—that require careful treatment. Managing uneven settlement, ensuring soil compaction, and maintaining slope stability pose significant challenges.
To address these issues, the earthwork engineering employs five main compaction methods: gravel piles, dynamic compaction, CFG piles, impact compaction, and vibration compaction. Different techniques are applied depending on the depth and geological conditions encountered.
In pursuit of environmental sustainability, cost savings, construction safety, and project quality, the command center introduced a self-developed digital construction management system by Xi’an Yinchi Network Technology Co., Ltd. Since May 2017, this system has been fully piloted in the foundation treatment and earthwork phases of the Tianfu Airport flight area, equipping over 600 large construction machines with digital management devices.
Initially, both property owners and construction teams were skeptical or resistant to the system. However, within less than a year, it earned unanimous acclaim from owners, supervisors, and construction units alike.
What makes this digital construction management system so impressive? Inside the airport construction command center, the reporter observed a digital construction quality monitoring platform. Management explained that all machinery used in soft foundation treatment—such as gravel pile drivers, dynamic compactors, vibratory rollers, impact rollers, and CFG pile drivers—is equipped with advanced monitoring components, including Beidou positioning antennas, data transmission modules, hydraulic sensors, and displacement sensors.
Take the dynamic compaction machine as an example. The system offers multiple ways to arrange compaction point locations, which are displayed on a tablet. This eliminates the need for manual site marking, allowing a single operator to manage the process efficiently. Utilizing the Beidou positioning system, the machine’s horizontal position, elevation, and orientation are pinpointed to centimeter accuracy. Key construction data—such as ramming frequency, distance, energy, and settlement—are automatically and precisely recorded.
The system also guides the operator to exact ramming points, simplifying manual work. Operators view the targeted ground coordinates on a display next to the driver’s cab with zero deviation. After dynamic compaction is complete, the quality monitoring system automatically calculates, stores, and transmits relevant compaction data, visually distinguished by surface color. This allows operators to easily identify weak spots and perform supplementary compaction. Additionally, the operation mode can switch seamlessly between day and night via the tablet, ensuring safe night-time construction.
At the headquarters office, a video surveillance system is integrated with the machinery monitoring system. Management staff can effortlessly access live feeds from the entire construction site down to individual machine cabs with a few clicks. They can also review recorded footage and perform inquiries as needed. Construction data is transmitted in real-time to the backend, where it is analyzed and compiled into various reports—such as construction progress, quality, and dynamic compaction machine status. These reports are shared through the monitoring platform with on-site managers, construction teams, and supervisors, enhancing oversight and replacing traditional spot-checking methods with more reliable and comprehensive supervision.
By automatically recording construction data, the system provides an effective basis for resolving on-site issues, significantly reducing disputes caused by differences between experience and construction standards. Overall, the digital equipment has solved longstanding problems of high labor consumption, difficulty in ensuring engineering quality, and lack of concrete evidence for handling site problems. Consequently, the digital construction method has been highly praised by contractors, construction parties, and supervisors for its “comprehensive equipment functionality, user-friendly design, and ability to improve both quality and efficiency.”
As the earthwork project at Chengdu Tianfu International Airport progresses, digital construction monitoring technology has already established a solid foundation. We can confidently expect that large-scale applications of this technology in civil aviation, railways, highways, and other infrastructure sectors will revolutionize traditional construction methods, ushering in a new era of big data powered by informatization and digitization.
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