Planning and structural details of the Burj Khalifa

1. BURJ KHALIFA
-ROHITH SAI REDDY
B.ARCH/10038/2015

2. SPECIFICATIONS
 Location: Dubai, UAE
 Height: 828 Mts.
 Area: 4,50,000 Sq.M
 Total storeys: 206
 Architect: Adrian Smith of SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill)
 Usage: Mixed use building
 Owners: Emaar properties

3. Height comparison

5. Design inspiration
 The architecture features a triple-lobed
footprint, an abstraction of a desert flower
named Hymenocallis (spider lilies)
 The tower is composed of three wings
arranged around a hexagonal central core.
 Twenty-six helical levels decrease the cross
section of the tower incrementally as it spirals
skyward.
 A Y-shaped floor plan maximizes views of the
Arabian Gulf. Viewed from the base or the air

6. Challenges
 Weak soil
 Mobility
 Gravitational loads
 Heat
 Speed of construction
 Wind load
 Seismic activity
 Fire safety

7. Foundation
 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
 Burj Khalifa uses a deep foundation design, consisting of both a
3.7 meter thick raft foundation and 192 bored piles

8. Mobility
 The Burj can accommodate about 35,000 people at a time
 The building consists of 57 elevators and 8 escalators some of
which travel at 35 kmph
 Also has a service/ fireman's elevator which have a capacity to
hold about 5,500kg

9. Gravitational loads
 The tower superstructure of Burj
Khalifa is designed as an all reinforced
concrete building with high
performance concrete from the
foundation level to level 156, and is
topped with a structural steel braced
frame from level 156 to the highest
point of the tower

10. Buttressed core
 The structural system for the Burj
Dubai can be described as a
“buttressed-core”
 Each wing, with its own high
performance concrete corridor walls
and perimeter columns, buttresses
the others via a six-sided central core

11. Cladding system
 The exterior cladding is comprised of reflective glazing with aluminium and
textured stainless steel spandrel panels and stainless steel vertical tubular fins
 The biggest challenge with glass cladding is the heat it absorbs- both UV
radiations from the sun and IR radiations from the heat reflected by the sand
 The panels used have 2 layers. The outer layer has a coating of metal that reflects
UV radiation and the inner layer has a coating of silver to reflect IR radiation

12. Cladding system
 Close to 26,000 glass panels, each individually
hand-cut, were used
 The cladding system is designed to withstand
Dubai's extreme summer heat and wind speeds up
to 75kmph
 A World War II airplane engine was used for
dynamic wind and water testing

13. Speed of construction
 In a project of 1.5 Bn dollars, every day is precious
 The formworks were fitted on to cranes and precast rebars were inserted into
them and concrete was then pumped into the formworks
 The 25000 tonnes of concrete was pumped to the top floors by specially designed
machines that use a 630 Hp engine (greater than a Bugatti Chiron) in 14 minutes
 The mixture needs to be in the right composition so as not to set earlier in the
pipes or not too late as to create delays in setting
 It takes 12 hrs for the concrete to set and in this way a floor was completed every
3 days

14. Wind load
 The higher the building goes the stronger the winds get and
in this region the winds were known to pick up speeds of
more than 80kmph but they diverted the loads by employing
some methods
 Varying the building shape along the height
 Reducing the floor plan along the height
 Using the building shapes to introduce spoiler type of effects
 Change the orientation of the tower in response to wind
directionality
 Even with this strategic design, the 206-story Burj Khalifa still
sways slowly back and forth by about 2 meters at the very
top

15. Earthquakes
 The region is said to experience moderate seismic activity and thus is not the
governing factor in the design (wind load is the governing factor)
 That being said, the structure can still withstand an earthquake which registers 6
on the Richter scale

16. Fire safety
 Fire alarms, sprinkler systems, stairwell pressurization and smoke evacuation
systems are the primary fire safety system
 The Burj is also equipped with 38 fire and smoke resistant evacuation lifts
 Pressurized and air-conditioned refuge areas are designed on almost every 25th
floor of this tower to ensure better safety as occupants can’t walk down160 floors
in one go
 These refuge rooms are made of RCC and fire proof sheets that resist the heat up
to 2hrs and have a special supply of air which pumps through fire resistant pipes

17. Some awe-inspiring facts
 During peak cooling hours, Burj Khalifa requires about 10,000 tons of cooling,
equivalent to the cooling capacity of approximately 10,000 tons of melting ice
 The ambient temperature at the tip of Burj Khalifa is six degrees cooler than the
temperature at ground level
 If you were to take all the concrete used in Burj Khalifa and lay a sidewalk, it would
be 2,065 kilometres
 It took 22 million man hours to build the tower

18. Some records held by the Burj khalifa
 Tallest building
 Tallest man-made structure
 Tallest free-standing structure
 Largest number of storeys
 Highest occupied floor
 Highest outdoor observation deck
 World record for vertical concrete pumping
 Tallest service elevator
 Highest aluminium and glass facade

19. Questions
What is the reason for the selection of the shape of the structure instead of the
traditional forms (apart from the reason to redirect winds)?
The temperatures reach up to 50 degree Celsius and are not suitable for the concrete
to be allowed to set. What would you have done to overcome this problem?

20. Bibliography
 www.Wikipedia.org
 www.burjkhalifa.ae
 www.archdaily.com
 www.youtube.com/natgeo
 www.emaar.com