Building strength into every seal: Inside Booth’s contract for UK high-speed rail
Iain Hoey
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Mike Jenkinson, Managing Director at Booth Industries, discusses how the company’s pressure-rated doors for HS2 are engineered for long-term reliability in extreme tunnel environments
As the High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) project continues to shape the future of UK rail infrastructure, Bolton-based Booth Industries expanded its role with a new £4.5 million contract to supply pressure-rated fire doors.
Building on its earlier work delivering cross-passage doors for the high-speed rail line, Booth is drawing on extensive design and engineering experience to meet complex safety and performance requirements.
Originally formed by John Booth in 1873 as a family-run blacksmiths, Booth Industries has become synonymous with the design, manufacture, supply and installation of high-performance bespoke and engineered doorsets.
The company played a central role in establishing national standards for fire protection doors and its doorsets can be found around the world in the most-demanding environments, from defence, security and offshore oil and gas installations, to nuclear and national infrastructure projects, such as HS2.
Managing Director Mike Jenkinson joined Booth Industries back in 2018 bringing over 15 years of expertise in heavily regulated industries, with a focus on compliance, quality, commercial strategy and building people-centric cultures.
Since Booth’s acquisition by Avingtrans PLC in 2019, he has led the hard-working team to transform the business, leveraging its proud heritage while focusing on its core strengths to drive sustainable growth in national infrastructure programmes around the world.
In this interview, Jenkinson discusses the challenges of delivering solutions for high-pressure environments, the development of Booth’s advanced manufacturing capability and how the business continues to innovate in the high-performance doors market.
How does the new HS2 contract build on the previous one Booth was awarded in 2020?
The first contract for HS2 was to design, fabricate and produce High Integrity Cross Passage Doors for Phases 1 and 2a of the HS2 project.
These safety doors play a crucial role in the operation of the railway, sealing off cross-passages between the separate north- and southbound tunnels and creating a safe means of escape in the event of fire.
With trains capable of travelling at speeds of unto 250mph passing within metres of the doors, they not only need to provide proven Fire Integrity and Insulation for over two hours but also withstand challenging environmental and fatigue pressures for over 35 years
Our most-recent HS2 contract is for a very similar variant of these doors, which have now been proven and tested.
Taking the learnings from the first contract, we have now translated it into a unique requirement for this new door, which has different configurations, sizes and performance requirements.
What specific challenges do doors used in a high-speed rail tunnel environment need to overcome?
The biggest engineering challenge is protecting the doorsets from fatigue over the lifecycle of the railway.
This is difficult to prove so has to be modelled virtually before being tested in a physical environment, with data then being validated across both sets of tests.
The HS2 project differs from any other performance requirement we typically service so we developed a unique testing programme to support the process, which we don’t believe has been carried out by any company previously.
This learning provides us with a unique capability that allows us to fast track design, testing and product approval processes, that otherwise would have taken months or even years to deliver for our customers.
What exactly is a pressure-rated door and why are they important for HS2?
The doors developed for HS2 have to be capable of withstanding constant pressure cycles, as well as providing two-hour integrity and two-hour insulation against fire.
Rather than resisting consistent pressure, trains passing by create a cyclical pressure that can reach over 12.5Kpa positive (pressure pulse) and 12.5Kpa negative (pressure vacuum), over 5.4 million times during the life of the doorset.
This creates its own unique engineering challenges.
The contract will be delivered using your new production facility – what are its key features and why was it developed?
We developed an energy-efficient 600m2 facility adjacent to our main factory to support delivery of the current HS2 contract and future ones, bringing our total manufacturing footprint to 6,400m2 and increasing capacity on the production line to allow us to fulfil HS2 contracts while delivering work for other customers.
The new facility houses a state-of-the-art robotic-arm and specialist assembly areas, along with a Factory Acceptance Testing area which is the final stage in the product build process
The new facility also forms a key part of our carbon reduction roadmap.
Designed to meet a CO2 emission rate of 28.2kg/CO2/m2, it uses a variety of thermal, lighting and energy-saving advances to improve energy efficiency and limit CO2 emissions.
95% of the demolition materials from the pre-existing building were recycled, with the remaining five percent – consisting of asbestos-containing materials – being disposed of safely.
How has the experience from the first HS2 contract shaped the design and testing of the new doors?
The doors developed for the initial Cross Passage Door Contract were ‘first of type’ and required significant testing and development work to meet the project’s stringent requirements.
We undertook a range of trials to see how the door would react under extreme pressures – including destructive testing for fire, fatigue, vibration and leakage.
Now we understand how they all interact in these conditions, we are able to harness the lessons learned to inform the new door designs and bring these into production much more quickly.
What kind of testing and development processes go into ensuring the long-term reliability of these doors?
Initial design testing took place in a virtual environment before moving on to physical tests to check that virtual and physical data correlated.
The process allowed us to assess and validate the doors’ performance over longer cyclic loads.
Our work in the oil and gas, nuclear and defence industries means we are well accustomed to providing products that meet rigorous quality standards but, moving into production, we were keen to ensure ease of manufacture too, in order to confidently deliver consistent quality levels.
Incorporating innovative new materials into the body of the door presented a number of challenges that we were able to successfully overcome through these test and development processes, as well as ensuring the doors could be manufactured in a sustainable manner to reduce their carbon footprint – a key commitment to HS2.
Beyond HS2, what role do you see Booth Industries playing in the future of infrastructure and safety-critical engineering?
The doors produced for HS2 have a strong focus on fatigue resistance and are best suited to rail or fast-road environments.
Both sectors are market driven industries and, with demand for similar projects growing across the world, the HS2 designs have already attracted interest from several parties.
Booth enjoys a strong heritage in safely-critical engineering and we believe that it is crucial that we are able to stand behind the quality and reliability of our products.
The HS2 project has led to a number of innovations, while our commitment to testing and improving performance standards has also highlighted product evolutions that will transfer into other doorsets.
For example, we recently launched a new fire door – the Crompton240 – which moves away from traditional fire door design and materials to deliver a proven 240 hours of fire resistance.
That design arose from an issue identified during in-house testing and is a sign of Booth’s commitment to constantly reviewing and refining its products to ensure the highest reliability and performance standards.
All Booth doorsets are built with sustainability, engineering and through-life cycle costs in mind and it is our strong performance heritage, combined with a culture of innovation, that means Booth stands as a beacon of excellence in the market – a one-stop solution delivering design, development and a full suite of products that are tested to the highest assurance standards.
When safety matters most, we believe that Booth is the name customers can trust to deliver assured performance across a range of demanding industries.