Wonders of The Burj Khalifa

Wonders of The Burj Khalifa

The Burj Khalifa is the ever built tallest man made structure. This tower rises in the sky to 828m carrying 163 above the ground. The Burj took 6 years for its construction and was completed in the year 2010. For erecting this city in the sky several new technologies had to be used.

Excavation

The soil stratum of Dubai is very week so they had to excavate up to 50m deep to get a hard rock structure. But the rock that they found was fragile and saturated with ground water. So that any hole made will be cured immediately.

The engineers filled this with a viscous polymer slurry. This pushes the rock and the ground water to the edges of the boreholes to keep it open, this slurry is denser than water and liter than concrete, so that when concrete is pumped the concrete displaces the fluid and forms the foundation. 192 piles were constructed for avoiding the sinking of this structure.

Casting of Structure

The casting of the whole structure is mainly done by two materials

1. Concrete

2. Steel

Over 45,000 m3 (58,900 cu yd) of concrete, weighing more than 110,000 tonnes were used to construct the concrete and steel foundation, which features 192 piles buried more than 50 m (164 ft) deep. Burj Khalifa's construction will have used 330,000 m3 (431,600 cu yd) of concrete and 39,000 tonnes (43,000 ST; 38,000 LT) of steel rebar, and construction will have taken 22 million man-hours.

Elevators and Escalators

The Burj can accommodate about 35,000 people at a time. Consist of 57 elevators and 8 escalators. The biggest elevator carries about 46 people at a time. These elevators travel at a speed of 35km/hr. The Burj has a service/firemans elevator which have a capacity to hold about 5,500kg, and this is the worlds tallest service elevator.

Cladding of the Tower

The Burj is claded with high-tech glass which forms as a curtain wall.

Glass panel

The solar contains UV radiations as well as IR radiations, so that the glass panel consist of two layers, the outer layer is coated with a thin layer of metal so that it reflects the UV radiations, the inner layer is coated with thin layer of silver so that it reflects the IR radiations.

Arrangement of glass panels in such a manner will make the building a green house, the hot air will only be absorbed by the glass panels and wont allow it to go out, so that air conditioners were provided for the cooling of the air and fresh air.

Concrete Used

High performance concrete(HPC), Low permeability, High durability and C80-C60 cube strength concrete was used, it includes fly ash and Portland cement. Two largest concrete pumping machines in the world were used for this purpose. For reducing cracks due to high temperature concreting was done only at night., so that air is cooler and humidity is higher with ice added to the mix