Nearly every directional boring crew has encountered it.
You start work on a project and quickly realize that the engineer who designed it may not have had a firm grasp of horizontal directional drilling (HDD) methods. And that makes your job tougher as you battle through project specs that are, to put it nicely, less than ideal.
Samuel Ariaratnam hears you, and he’s trying to help.
Excited by HDD
Ariaratnam teaches seniors and graduate students studying engineering at Arizona State University, where he is also the program chair for construction engineering. He has his doctorate in civil engineering and sometimes goes by “Dr. Sam.”
At the start of each semester in his construction engineering and management class, he encounters a room full of intelligent young engineers who know very little about horizontal directional drilling. This despite their chosen profession and the fact that directional drills are all around them — something they soon realize.
“They actually see these rigs, but they don’t know what they are,” Ariaratnam says. “They just drive past them. And then they take the class and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, now I know what that is.’”
His goal is more than just raising awareness, however. He wants the next generation of civil and construction engineers to recognize the potential of HDD and to have the knowledge to properly design an HDD project.
By the end of the semester, that lesson has sunk in for most students, although his class is not exclusively about horizontal directional drilling.
“They’re real excited by HDD,” Ariaratnam says. “They think it’s incredible yet quite straightforward in terms of how it works. And they think it’s just an interesting technology and really cutting edge.”
HDD curriculum
There are several assignments that help get them to that point. They have to read an article about HDD and write an essay. They also research and do a presentation about a challenging HDD project. Another assignment is to design an underground construction project. The installation method does not have to be directional boring, but oftentimes that is what students select.
For nearly 15 years, Ariaratnam has also worked with a local Vermeer dealer to take his class on a field trip to horizontal directional drilling jobsites.
Ariaratnam tries to drill home several points about directional boring with his students:
- It is very efficient from a productivity perspective.
- It can be less disruptive than other underground construction methods.
- It can be safer than other methods because of the lack of trenches.·
- It has environmental advantages, including lower carbon emissions.
Awareness low among professionals
This matters for HDD contractors and crews because many of Ariaratnam’s students go on to work for engineering firms, utility companies, construction companies, municipalities and other organizations that touch the underground market.
They have the potential to infuse the civil engineering profession with some much needed knowledge of horizontal directional drilling. Ariaratnam, who is active in trenchless industry organizations and was a judge for the Vermeer Ultimate Crew contest in 2015, estimates that on a scale of 1 to 10, the general knowledge of horizontal directional drilling among civil engineers is a 3 or 4.
“Horizontal directional drilling and trenchless technology in general are not mainstream in any civil or construction engineering curriculum,” he says.
The consequences of a lack of knowledge is that HDD either isn’t included in bid documents or, when it is, the project is poorly designed. Ariaratnam is working to change that.
“I see a huge future in horizontal directional drilling,” he says. “We have a long way to go in raising awareness about HDD, but that’s a positive thing too because we have a huge market to capture.”