Kingdom Tower Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaThis is the tower that is set to steal the crown of the world's tallest building from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai - and its going to need 500,000 cubic metres of concrete and 80,000 tonnes of steel to build it.
The Kingdom Tower, the world's first kilometre-high skyscraper, is currently under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
It will be the centrepiece of the Kingdom City development located along the Red Sea on the north side of Jeddah.
Kingdom Tower will be more than 1,000 metres high (3,280 feet), encompassing a total construction area of 530,000 square metres (5.7 million square feet). The building will have 200 floors in total, 160 of which are habitable. Its preliminary cost is set at US$1.23 billion.
When completed it will be 173m (568 feet) taller than the Burj Khalifa.
Fresh details of the project were announced on Monday when Advanced Construction Technology Services (ACTS), a consulting organisation in the field of construction materials and geotechnical engineering, said it had been commissioned to carry out the quality control of all construction materials that will be used in tower project.
The firm said the huge height of Kingdom Tower requires high strength, high performance concrete, and ACTS said it will be using state-of-the art testing equipment and expert professionals to do the third party testing works on about half a million cubic metres of concrete and about 80,000 tonnes of steel to be used on the mega project.
ACTS will also deploy special equipment to evaluate the rheological properties of concrete to ensure concrete will be pumpable to very high elevations.
Deploying about 100 staff, ACTS plans to install a fully-equipped site laboratory, which will carry the day-to-day quality control operations and will also provide specialised testing services from its laboratory facility in Briman area in Jeddah, which is one of the largest testing facilities in the Middle East.
ACTS has been involved on similarly challenging large infrastructure projects around the Gulf, and has been providing a range of quality control services including inspection and supervision, monitoring of mass concrete, testing and evaluation of various materials as well as audit for asphalt and concrete production facilities.
Among the mega projects previously commissioned to ACTS for quality control was Jeddah's King Abdulaziz International Airport, which involved the testing of a total of 3.5 million cubic meters of concrete.
© 7Days 2014
