Week 3: Day 16

Visit to Burj Al Salam

On Monday June 2nd the two teams once again visited different job sites. Team 2 visited The Bright Start Beach Resort, while Team 1 visited the Burj Al Salam. Mr. Edgars gave Team 1 the tour of The Burj Al Salam, which is an enormous building with a car park, residential, hotel and office towers and a built up area of over three million square feet! The building is contracted by DCC for the Abdul Salam Al Rafi Group. The structure is primarily post tension slabs with in situ cast reinforced concrete columns. the project is in its finishing stages with the residential area completed, the office area is left as a shell and core (clients are responsible for the finishes) and work is being completed on the hotel area finishes. The project began in September 2010 and is expected to be completed only a few months late in August 2014. 

Mr. Edgars gave us a tour of each one of the towers, as well as the car park paying special attention to the finishes. The main finishes noticed in each one of the entrances were walnut timber cladding on the walls, gypsum board on the ceiling, and calacatta olo marble tiles on the floors. We then toured through many of the residential and hotel rooms.

Chandelier in the residential entrance

Gym

Eleventh floor steel bridge connecting
the hotel to the gym and car park.

Pool on the roof of car park

On the fifty-third floor there is an expansive area with large windows overlooking the Dubai skyline that could later accommodate a restaurant. The fifty-fourth floor houses many of the mechanical services, such as the AC units and pumps. The roof top has a number of lifts that are installed with tracks to allow workers to be lowered down in a cage, giving them easy access to clean all the windows of the building.      

Mechanical Services

BMU for window cleaning and services

Site Visit to UPC: United Precast Concrete

On the afternoon, the site visit to the United Precast Concrete Company was scheduled. UPC originally started in Bahrain and currently has other company branches in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Mr. Jack Kara, project manager at e-construct, accompanied the first team in a tour around the factory while Mr. Irana, project manager at UPC, accompanied the second team.

The visit featured a tour in the 2 batching plants of the factory. One plant is for hollow core slab while the other plant is for the walls, columns and beams.

UPC Factory

On the tour in the first plant, the interns witnessed concrete being poured by the casting machine. As well, the students saw the stressed and elongated strands by the hydraulic jack. In addition, the saw cutting machine for cutting slab and the curing of prestressed concrete slab were also visible for the interns.

 

Hydraulic Jack for strands stressing

 

Casting Machine

On the tour in the second plant, the interns examined column reinforcements that are done separately outside the mold for a precast column. These reinforcements are then placed inside the mold in which concrete is then poured. The activity of concrete surface leveling was also identified by the students. In addition, the thermal insulation between 2 concrete layers for a precasted wall was also noticed as well as the mesh reinforcement in the wall.

Column Reinforcement

Afterwards, the team toured in the factory's lab where cube compression tests are done and aggregate samples are stored.

The visit continued with the intern's inspection of the aggregates storage area and the factory's 2 batching machines were concrete is mixed and transformed for different designated locations.

The tour ended with Mr Jack showing the interns the different finishings that can be done using precasted concrete.

Various Precast Concrete Finishes