Projects

Aircraft Hangar - USA

An airlines company was seeking a solution to allow them to get a large airplane with high tail clearance requirement into an aircraft hangar which has already reached the allowable height limit of its zone and the roof height couldn't be further increased. The design was a series of trusses with maximum height at the middle of the hangar, where the tail needs to pass, and it tapers down towards the edges. There were double height office blocks, at each side of the hangar, which support the air handling units.

Beach Resort - UAE

In this unique beach resort, there were a lot of elevated boardwalks servicing the water villas. These boardwalks were supported on double piles every 12m with longitudinal beams over the piles on each side and the services running between these beams. These boardwalks were only supporting pedestrian and buggy loads and were located in a completely sheltered area with very minor environmental loads.

Beach Resort - USA

While reviewing a beach resort with large areas of external timber decking, we noticed that all this decking was supported on a grid of concrete beam which, in their turn, were supported on hundreds of piles. When discussing the reason behind this heavy structure, consultant highlighted that there was a layer of silt at water table and the soil investigation recommended piling.

Car Park Building - USA

The project is a car park building with 18 x 9 m grid of columns. After structural review, we found out that a row of 1m deep x 1.5m wide RC beams at 3m centers were used to span the 18m bays. These beams were resting on a 1m deep x 2m wide RC beam spanning in the 9m direction. The dead of the slab was several time the parking load it was supporting.

Dry Dock – UAE

The project consists of a dry dock with a diaphragm wall on three sides of the proposed excavation. The owner approached us for our opinion on two proposals he had to temporarily block the seaside of the excavation in order to allow dewatering and excavation to construct the raft which will serve as the dry dock floor and support the operable water gate.

Elevated Roadway - USA

While reviewing an elevated roadway supported on pile caps at 12m centers we noticed that the pile diameter was too high for the loads on this roadway. During our value engineering exercise, we were told that the critical load case was a truck breaking and, since the designer has provided joints at each pile cap, the whole breaking force was supported by a single pile cap, thus resulting in a heavy moment on the piles.

High End Luxury Villas – Gated Community – UAE

The project consists of a large number of villas in a gated community. The soil consists of a homogeneous layer of soft silty clay at water table level 3m below the natural ground level. These villas were high end luxury villas with their own garden and swimming pool. There was a lot of hardscape and boundary walls which were all to be supported on piles according to the geotechnical recommendation and this resulted in a huge number of piles which drove the cost out of budget.

Internal Road Network – UAE

We were approached by a developer to check the necessity of introducing stone columns under internal roads in one of their projects where they were only building infrastructure and roads. After studying the soil investigation report we found that there was homogeneous layer of soft to medium clayey silt at water table level, 3m below the natural ground level on which the road is to be constructed. The site was flat and so were the roads.

Medical Centre - UAE

The project is an iconic medical center with some large cantilever features which was designed using structural steel due to the light weight characteristic of this structural system. The design was done in the US, where the cost of constructing in steel was more or less the same as concrete construction.

Mosque – UAE

Our client was building a mosque in an area where cavities have been mapped. There was a network of cavities in the limestone underneath the site reaching down to 35 m (end of exploration). The largest mapped cavity dimension was 7m. The structure consisted of a basement and a ground floor and the column grid was 12m x 12m. The Municipal Engineer has requested the client to use 40m long piles with permanent casing under the columns and a suspended ground slab, which resulted in a very expensive foundation solution.

Multi-Purpose Commercial Development - USA

The project consists of 5 basements with three double-height (Mezzanine by tenant) floors above ground. The columns were on an 8m x 8m grid with tension piles underneath each column and a 1.5m thick raft.

Office Building Extension – UAE

A client had two existing office buildings in a key area and the regulation has changed, allowing more height in that area. He went to the building design consultant to explore the possibility to increase the number of floors. The consultant told him that the maximum that he could increase, with column strengthening, was two floors.

Piling – UAE

We were approached by a piling contractor who had a pile load test of 60'000 kN. An initial design of six ground anchors and an assembly of built-up steel beams was studied for this purpose. The steel beams were placed in two tiers: one beam directly above the jack on top of the pile and two beams above in the perpendicular direction. The beams were connected at each end to the ground anchors.

Residential Towers - USA

The project consists of towers and a large area 3 story building for car parking and plant. We noticed that 2m dia piles, with very heavy reinforcement, were used under this 3 story building and the owner was facing difficulty with the availability of piling contractors able to execute such a large diameter. During our discussions with the consultant on why such a pile was used under this 3 story building, they explained that the original soil was loose with a potential for liquifaction and there is an intended engineered backfill of 3m in 10 layers underneath the ground floor. The massive size and reinforcement of these piles was due to considering a horizontal force on these piles equal to the passive pressure developing from the 3m engineered fill as the land is trying to move towards the sea when the underlying soil liquifies in a seismic event.

Shopping Mall – USA

We were approached to check the ground slab design for a mall where the spans were 9m x 18m and piles were used to support the columns. The ground level was framed at a 9m x9m grid of beams supporting a 300mm heavily reinforced solid slab. Intermediate piles were introduced in the 18m direction solely to support these beams.

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