Even before the shovel is in the ground for the Fornebu line, small Geonor is already working on the first contract in the giant project.
Long before the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Fornebubanen subway line in Oslo, while the engineers are still discussing where the tunnel will go, the small company Geonor has started the first work. They are now halfway through the work of placing 350 groundwater meters from 5 to 50 meters down in the ground around the planned tunnel.
Learnedfrom Romeriksporten
The new track from Majorstuen to Fornebu was finally approved last year, and is estimated to cost around NOK 12-13 billion. The Geonor contract is worth around NOK 17 million, for the installation of approximately 350 pore pressure meters to monitor the groundwater conditions around the tunnel, as well as follow-up and checks for nine years.
- "This is by far the largest delivery in the company's history, and puts us in a position to deliver cost-effective solutions for major projects in the future," says Managing Director Øyvind Klevar. The developer's fear is, of course, a repeat of the biggest construction scandal in Norwegian history from 1997, when the Romeriksporten airport train tunnel drained a wetland area in Østmarka and made 50 houses uninhabitable. Similar systems can be installed to monitor all new tunnels, road projects, rail developments and large buildings, and in areas with unsafe ground conditions. The need to map Norway's large quick clay deposits was the basis for today's strong geotechnical engineering community in Norway.
What's new this time is that the meters are not connected to a SIM card and mobile coverage, but are instead connected to a separate network via a closed radio frequency.
- In principle, it is an IoT (Internet of Things) system where the customer receives everything directly on their own network. It's easier to install than GSM systems, requires less equipment, far fewer batteries, no SIM cards and, not least, you control your data and traffic yourself. This has not previously been done in Norway on such a large scale," Klevar explains.
For such a small company, Geonor has a surprisingly long history. It was established by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) and NTNF (the equivalent of the Research Council of Norway today) in 1957 to develop and manufacture instruments that NGI and others needed for their investigations. The pore pressure meters that the company developed back then have long since become the industry standard all over the world.
2023 Geonor
