A crucial footfall towards building the next tallest building on Earth is afoot : Engineers on the Kingdom Tower , aproposed3,280 foot column in Jeddah , Saudi Arabia , are beginning tests to figure out how to pump wet concrete more than half a mile into the sky .
There are plenty of technical challenge involved with building a one - kilometer - high pillar , including ( but in no way confine to ! ) lustreless elevator technical school and the sheer system of weights of a tower this tall . And we have n’t hear about Kingdom in month , which seemed to indicate that the economic need just was n’t there .
But this workweek , the developer of the towerannouncedthat an outside consultant — Advanced Construction Technology Services — is starting tests on the materials postulate to build the tower : half a million cubic meter of concrete and around 80,000 heaps of steel .
There are all kind of reasons why this is the first item on the engineering agenda . First of all , the pillar ’s foundation will be 200 infantry deep — and it has to defy the salt water of the nearby ocean . One of the major thing ACTS will test is the strength of different high-pitched - functioning concretes — the most essential piece of the teaser , along with the steel itself .
Up top , things are more complicated : To pour each successive level , crews will have to pump millions of tons of concrete through a thin , pressurized tube — generally about six inches widely — to be pour by crews above . And gravity , as you might expect , does not get along well with wet concrete .
A traditional concrete ticker . Image : Wikimedia .
So after ACTS finishes test the strength of the concrete mix that ’ll be used in Jeddah , its engine driver will move on to logistics like pumping — and it sounds like they ’ll be looking intimately at how the Burj Khalifa did it .
When the Burj was build , it specify a record for highest concrete pumping . A Samsung - conduct engineering science squad was capable to pump almost six million cubic fundament of concrete through a single tube , thanks to high - tech ticker develop by the German companyPutzmeister .
Image viaLEGO / Putzmeister .
Throughout almost the entire project , worker could only pour new story at nighttime — the temperatures , in the daytime , made it impossible .
image : Putzmeister .
Of of course , the braggart caveat to all of this is that the Kingdom Tower might not ever get make . But that does n’t actually weigh as much as you might expect . prove that concrete can be pour at one kilometer is just the next step along a ravel that hit far beyond that . As Dr. Sang Dae Kim , the director of the Council on Tall Buildings , put it toConstruction Weekly , “ in terms of practicalities , we do n’t need to build at two kilometre — but someone with a circumstances of money might still need to do it . ”
So the full point of testing the engineering is to prove that it can be done — if not in Jeddah , then somewhere else . [ Saudi-Arabian Gazette ]
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