THE DEEPEST FOUNDATION ON THE PLANET
This
record belongs to the famous “Petronas
Towers”,
also known as the Petronas Twin Towers located in Kaulalampur, Malaysia.These are twin skyscrapers & they held a record for the tallest building in
the world from 1998 to 2004.This record was surpassed by Taipei 101 in 2004.
It was designed by Argentine
architect Cesar Pelli. The Petronas Towers has a tube in tube structural
system, patented by Fazlur Rahman Khan.
During geological investigation,
when test boreholes were made it was found that the original construction site laid on a cliff edge.
One half of the site was soft rock
while the other half was decayed limestone.Hence the entire site was relocated by 61 meters so that the
structure completely rests on soft rock.
Since the depth of bedrock was
huge, the buildings had to be built on “world’s
deepest foundation”. . The concrete raft foundation, comprising 13,200 cubic meters of concrete was
continuously poured through a period of 54
hours for each tower.104 concrete
piles, ranging from 60m to 114m,
were bored into the ground
The raft is 4.6 meters thick,
weighs 35,800 tons and held the world
record for the largest concrete pour until 2007. The foundations were
completed within 12 months.
Due to the high cost of importing
steel, the towers were constructed using super
high-strength reinforced concrete.High-strength concrete is twice as effective as steel in sway reduction.
But, it makes the building twice as
heavy on its foundation as a comparable steel building.
Towers are supported by 23m x 23m
concrete cores and an
outer ring of widely spaced super columns, the towers use a sophisticated
structural system which provides 560,000 square meters of column-free space.
No comments:
Post a Comment