Week 3: Day 2

Monday May 31, 2010

           

Team 1: The Conrad Hotel

The Pinnacle Engineering team (Team 1) went to our last visit of the Conrad Hotel today. First we met with the site engineer from Dubai Contracting Company L.L.C. We learned the logistics and specifications of the hotels automated carpark. The carpark foundation consists of fifty piles, with shoring along the outside. It is made up of one basement, a ground floor, and twelve stories. On the roof of the carpark there will be landscaping which is for aesthetic purposes only. There is a bridge that connects the carpark to the actual hotel. The car park is completely automatic, the cars are dropped off in the front and then the system parks the cars on any of the twelve available floors. It costs roughly forty percent more to build a carpark that is completely automated but it leaves room for more cars. Conrad Hotel’s carpark can park approximately 1200 cars.

After the lecture on the hotel carpark, the project manager from Arabtec, the company that is joined with Dubai Contracting Company L.L.C, spoke to our team about submittals. Submittals are extremely important to the timing of the project. We learned that contractors must submit approvals to order any materials. It is crucial to get these submittals sent in, and approved quickly, because they can delay a project if the consultant does not approve them. It is important to submit most materials for approval within forty to sixty days because some materials take time if importing is needed.

Once we finished our lectures, the site engineer of DCC took us to the mock hotel room. The contractor builds one mock room in order to have the design, finishes, and materials approved by the consultant. The consultant may approve the mockup with comments in which case the contractor is allowed to go forward with construction, but has to make the revisions. The mockups are important because they allow the contractor to finish the rooms perfectly before starting to build all of the other rooms. When we were in the hotel room, we were instructed to look around and find any snags with the finishes of the room. It was hard to find any however because the room we visit had already been approved by the consultant.  

Group 2: The Kingdom Of Sheba

Our second visit began with a discussion about Post-Tensioned (PT) slabs. A representative from the PT subcontractor explained all of the elements of post-tensioned concrete work. As we took our site tour he explained where the steel was located and how many beams were replaced by using PT instead of typical reinforced concrete slabs. We then had a demonstration of how the steel strands were reshaped with a hydraulic jack. The strands are pushed into an onion shape so they do not pull out of the concrete during the post-tensioning process.

During the site tour we went up to the eleventh floor of Block C in the Balqis residence where DCC was waiting for approval to cast the reinforced concrete transfer slab. Because of the different arrangement of columns and the heavy point loads the columns cause on this slab, PT could not be used. Originally the floor was divided into three penthouses. However a tenant purchased two of the apartments to combine into one. The architectural and structural plans were all changed to suit the owner’s needs. Unfortunately, design changes like this often cause delays in construction.

From the eleventh floor we went down to the basement. The formwork for the sprinkler system water tank was under construction while we visited. Originally the designs had called for a plastic and fiberglass water tank but according to Dubai’s strict building codes, the tank had to be redesigned with concrete. This was a huge oversight by the designer because now, with the floor slab already cast above the basement, there is not enough head room for vibrators in the tank walls. To solve this problem DCC will have to use self-compacting concrete for the tank, an expensive mistake by the designers.