ACTS appointed to oversee quality control on Kingdom Tower
Construction consultant to deploy 100 expert staff to a fully-equipped onsite laboratory
Advanced Construction Technology Services, a construction consultant that specialises in materials and geotechnical engineering, has been appointed to carry out quality control on all construction machinery used on the Kingdom Tower project.
The world’s first kilometre-high skyscraper, the Kingdom Tower is currently under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It is to be the centrepiece of the massive Kingdom City real estate development along the Red Sea, in the north of Jeddah.
Designed to be more than 1,000metres tall and encompass a total construction area of 530,000sqm, the Kingdom Tower is set to be one of the biggest construction projects ever undertaken in Saudi Arabia. The building will have 200 floors in total, 160 of which will be habitable.
Preliminary costs of construction are estimated at $1.23 billion, and the project will overshadow Dubai’s Burj Khalifa by at least 173 metres.
“We selected ACTS after a thorough evaluation of their capabilities and strength. We look forward to working with them to ensure this project receives the best attention to quality it deserves,” said Engineer Nabil Batrawi, project director of Saudi Bin Ladin Group.
In a statement, ACTS said that it would be mobilising ‘state of the art’ equipment and ‘expert professionals’ to do the third party testing works on about half a billion cubic metres of concrete and around 80,000 tons of steel, which will be used on the project.
The consultant will also deploy special equipment to evaluate the rheological properties of concrete to ensure that the concrete will be pumpable to very high elevations, a necessary precaution given the great height of the Kingdom Tower, which will require High Strength, High Performance concrete.
As part of its consultant remit, ACTS will deploy 100 expert staff members to a fully equipped site laboratory, which will carry out the day-to-day quality control operations, while also providing specialised testing services from its laboratory in Briman, Jeddah – one of the largest testing facilities in the Middle East.
“The appointment of ACTS as an independent testing agency for one of the most challenging engineering structures in the world, is a vote of trust in ACTS’ capabilities and extensive experience in materials testing and engineering. We will be investing our experience and knowledge to provide accurate, traceable and reliable test information in the largest megatall building in the world,” said Engineer Khaled Awad, chairman of ACTS.
ACTS has been involved on similarly challenging large infrastructure projects around the Gulf, and has been providing a range of quality control services including inspection and supervision, monitoring of mass concrete, testing and evaluation of various materials as well as audit for asphalt and concrete production facilities.
Among the mega projects previously commissioned to ACTS for quality control was Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport, which involved the testing of a total of 3.5 million cubic meters of concrete.
