Research on World Trade Centre, Bahrain

1. Bahrain World
Trade Center
By:- DISHANT RAUTELA 

2. Bahrain World Trade Center
 World trade centre, Bahrain (also called Bahrain WTC or BWTC
 It is a 240-metre-high (787 ft.), 50-floor, twin tower towers rising above a 3-storey podium
development adjacent to the Sheraton Hotel in the Commercial Business District of Manama,
Bahrain.
 It forms the focal point of a masterplan to rejuvenate an existing hotel and shopping mall. Rising
to 240 metres in height, the twin office towers create a dramatic focal point visible throughout
the Kingdom.
 The towers were built in 2008.
INTRODUCTION
 150 million dollar was required to built Bahrain World Trade
Centre
 It currently ranks as the second-tallest building in Bahrain,
after the twin towers of the Bahrain Financial Harbour.

3.  Tapering to a height of 240m, each tower is
visually anchored to the ground by a concertina of
curved, sail-like forms, and provides 34 floors of
office space and an exclusive viewing deck on the
42nd floor.
 Unique to this building and rising to the challenge
of incorporating renewable energy solutions within
sustainable architecture.
 The design features three horizontal axis wind
turbines mounted between the towers, taking
advantage of the prevailing onshore wind to
generate electricity,
 the Bahrain World Trade Centre design includes
three 29m diameter wind turbines horizontally
supported on bridges.
 The turbines are expected to produce between 11
and 15 percent of the total electrical consumption
of the towers.

4.  The towers were built in 2008 by the multi-national architectural
firm Atkins.
 Atkins was appointed to provide all master planning architecture and
structural and MEP engineering design services for the Bahrain World
Trade Centre site, located on the main King Faisal Highway in Manama,
Bahrain.
 More than half its area was previously developed, and comprised the
Sheraton Bahrain Hotel, an associated single-storey luxury shopping
mall, an office tower, car parking facilities, services and landscaped
areas.
HISTORY
 They developed the masterplan for the extended development that
rejuvenates the existing mall and hotel and provides additional 50
storey twin office towers with unobstructed views over the Arabian
Gulf.
 Technical validation included computational fluid dynamics modelling,
wind tunnel testing, vibration and acoustic assessments, electrical
integration analysis and SARM analysis.

5.  Bahrain is an island in the Persian Gulf and is exposed to wind
flows that come across the Persian Gulf.
 70% of the wind flow from the Persian Gulf comes directly
onshore in Bahrain. This natural exposure to wind makes Bahrain
an ideal location for energy generation from wind.
 The WTC architects created a world’s structural first by
atheistically incorporaeting commercial wind turbines into the
fabric of the building.

6. CASE STUDY
LOCATION
 The Bahrain World Trade Center (also called Bahrain WTC or is located within the centre of
the Kingdom’s Commercial Business District, Manama, with direct access off the King Faisal
Highway.
 The structure is constructed close to the King Faisal Highway, near popular landmarks such as
the towers of Bahrain Financial Harbour (BFH), NBB and Abraj-Al-Lulu.
 It currently ranks as the second-tallest building in Bahrain, after the twin towers of the
Bahrain Financial Harbour.Its condinates are 26° 14′ 21″ N, 50° 34′ 53″ E

7. SOME NEARBY BUILDINGS
Bahrain Financial
Harbour
Abraj-Al-Lulu
NBB Building

8.  The towers were built in 2008 by the multi-national architectural firm Atkins.
 The original company, WS Atkins & Partners, was established by the late Sir William Atkins in 1938 with
offices in Westminster in London.
 It expanded rapidly after World War II into specialist services in town planning, engineering
sciences, architecture and project management.
 The company has been trading under the Atkins name since 2002.
 In 2009 Atkins was selected as the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Games.
Some of their notable projects
ARCHITECTS
Hotel The Address Downtown The light house tower XIAN-INTERNATIONAL ARIPORTBURJ-AL-ARAB

9. KEY PLAN
Bus/Railway station distance Hospital distance Police station distance
Airport distance

10. SIZE
 The site has an area of 120000 sq. m. this area contains landscaping, office buildngs, Anchor
Tenant, Garden Court, Car Parking.
 The plan remodelled a hotel and a shopping mall in a prestigious area near the Arabian Gulf.
 Building, its parking and mall area is
88,617 sq.m.
 Its floor area is 16,500 sq. m.

11. UPPER TURBINE -37th FLOOR
MIDDLE TURBINE- 27th FLOOR
LOWER TURBINE – 17th FLOOR
 LENGTH OF EACH TOWER IS 68 m (APPROX)
 WIDTH OF TOWER IS 23 m (APPROX)
 LENGTH OF SITE IS 226 m. CONSIDERING WITH
SHOPPING MALL AND PARKING.
 WIDTH OF SITE IS 130 m. CONSIDERING WITH
SHOPPING MALL AND PARKING

12. NORTH FACE ELEVATION
 In addition to the office towers, the
development includes an extension to the
existing retail mall, new restaurants and cafes,
refurbishment of the adjacent 5-star hotel
and 1,700 parking spaces.
 The twin towers are framed predominantly in
reinforced concrete, with structural steelwork
used for the clad steel spire, panoramic lift
enclosure and mezzanine floors.
 There are 45 floors (excluding mezzanines)
from the ground floor of the podium, as well
as a 4.5 metre deep single storey basement.
 Each tower has a separate continuous piled
raft foundation at basement level.
 The raft slabs vary in thickness according to
loading and incorporate lift pits.
 Beneath the main cores the raft thickness is
3.0 metres and the piles are 1200mm
diameter, closely spaced

13. ORIENTATION
 World trade centre, oriented in such a way that it
face Arabian Gulf.
 The wind climate in the Arabian Gulf with its
dominant sea breeze characteristic is
conducive to harnessing wind energy.
 Its oriented by facing its turbines toward north –
west direction, to get maximum wind flow.
 From north-west direction it gets around 6.42
m/sec. to 11.2 m/sec wind speed
 The authorities thought that it will get wind
speed around 25m/sec, but in actual its half
of it.
 this air flow considered as S – flow.

14.  This orientation provides 1,100 and 1,300 MWh per
year and will provide for approximately 11% to 15%
of the office towers’ electrical energy consumption.
 We can see from figures that the part contains
turbines receives maximum air flow, that due to S –
streamline shape of building .
The blue part gets maximum air flow. When air flow is from true nort-west

15. CONCEPT
 The concept design was inspired by the traditional Arabian
“Wind Towers” and the shape of the sails of ships that use
wind energy to surf in that the shape of the buildings harness
the prevailing onshore breeze from the Gulf.
 The two buildings that make up the complex are inspired by the
shape of the sails of ships that use wind energy to surf like the
WTC uses wind energy to supply the needs of the activities
taking place inside it.
 The project also aims to show the world that countries of the
United Arab Emirates, known globally for its oil production, also
have launched renewable energy.

16. Foundation • Each tower has a separate continuous piled raft
foundation at basement level.
• The raft slabs vary in thickness according to
loading and incorporate lift pits.
• Beneath the main cores the raft thickness is 3.0
metres and the piles are 1200mm diameter,
closely spaced and rated at 18MN safe working
load.
• Away from the main core the raft thickness
reduces progressively to 2.0 metres and the piles
to 1050mm diameter, more widely spaced and
rated at 8MN safe working load.
• The loads acting on the pile group are predominantly
dead loads, imposed loads and wind loads.
• These act in combination to generate maximum and
minimum pile loads.
• Individual piles were modelled in the finite element
analysis as vertical springs
BENDING MON+MENTS PER
METRE LENGTH ANALYSIS FOR
FOUNDATION

17. Primary structural system
 The twin towers are in a ‘V’ formation, typically
mirrored about their axis of symmetry.
 The primary structure comprises main and secondary
reinforced concrete cores, the main core consist
housing lifts, escape stairs and toilets and secondary
core housing an escape stair and electrical/telecoms
rooms.
 The floor plates typically consist storey height of 3.6
metres and are framed with reinforced vertical
concrete columns on an 8.0m grid
PLAN OF A FLOOR SHOWING ELEMENTS
 The wind load on the towers is resisted
primarily by the main concrete core; secondary
concrete core helps to relieve the main cores
loads. The load transfer between the two cores
occurs between the 20th and 24th floor levels.

18.  The columns are positioned in a 26 ft grid pattern and
the floor plates have a typical storey height of 12 ft.
 The raking columns triangulate both of the cores
providing the towers with a stiff framework. Due to
the tapering shape of the towers, the secondary core
terminates before reaching the highest office.
 The panoramic core extends higher into the towers
supporting the duplex offices and viewing gallery.
 Above the gallery, lattice steelwork is used to
structure the top clad section to help reduce weight.
 The tapering shape of the towers also means that the
center of gravity, center of mass, and center of
stiffness vary on each floor, moving towards the
panoramic lifts with increasing height.
 The results of this may lead to dead load sway,
however the possibility of that is very small because
of the stiffening framework provided by the raking
columns and the concentration of piles beneath the
main core to reduce base rotation.
VERTICAL LOADS

19.  The two towers are linked via three skybridges, each
holding a 225kW wind turbine, totalling to 675 kW of
wind power capacity.
 Each turbines measure 29 m (95 ft) in diameter, and
is aligned north-west, which is the direction from
which air from the Persian Gulf blows in.
 Bridges are of ovoid in shape.
 Three horizontal axis wind turbines have
been integrated into the building to
generate electricity.
 The fixed horizontal turbine suffers the
drawback of only being able to operate with
wind from a limited azimuth range - if
problems with blade deflections and
stressing through excessive skew flow are
to be avoided.
Wind turbines and support bridges
OVOID SHAPE

20. CONCLUSION
The Bahrain World Trade Centre is the world’s first large-scale integration of wind turbines into a building.
This integration was one of the principal challenges on the project. The turbines were commissioned in April
2007, and global interest was received from environmental and architectural bodies, media and private
institutions across the world. Other challenges on the project included the ‘fasttrack’ approach adopted for
design and construction, the sheer scale and complexity of the project and the integration of the reinforced
concrete, structural steelwork and cladding elements of the design. With their distinctive instantly
recognisable design and utilisation of wind power, the twin towers are likely to become well known worldwide
and contribute to developing Bahrain’s reputation as an appealing destination.
Design errors
Using precise wind tunnel measurements and computer simulations on a model of the
Bahrain WTC, Blocken calculated that the towers would actually produce 14 percent
more wind energy if they were positioned the other way round. Or better still,
suspending the wind turbines further back would have given a 31% higher energy
output per year, Blocken discovered. Also if they build it facing north west direction,
then it will get more power capacity. But that is no fair comparison, says the
researcher. “Because of constructive and financial reasons this option isn’t realistic.”