Kingdom Tower testing to begin as 1km Saudi project aims higher than Burj Khalifa as world’s tallest

Half a million cubic metres of concrete and about 80,000 tons of steel to undergo quality control to check that they can be used at such high elevations.

Kingdom Tower is set to be the world’s tallest building, standing over 1km in height when it is expected to be completed in 2018. Rendering courtesy EC Harris/Mace

Half a million cubic metres of concrete and about 80,000 tons of steel set to be used to build the world’s first kilometre tall tower are to be tested to check that they can be used at high elevations.

Saudi Binladin Group, the construction company building what is expected to be the world's tallest tower, said it had appointed Advanced Construction Technology Services (ACTS) to carry out quality control checks on the construction materials to be used on the ambitious Kingdom Tower project in Jeddah.

The Lebanese-based ACTS said it would deploy about 100 expert staff members to the Jeddah project and would install a fully-equipped site laboratory, which would carry the day-to-day quality control operations and would also provide specialised testing services from its laboratory facility in the Briman area in Jeddah, which it said was one of the largest testing facilities in the Middle East.

ACTS said that the extreme height of the Kingdom Tower meant that it would be required to use high strength, high performance concrete and to use special equipment to evaluate how the concrete flowed so that it could be pumped to very high elevations.

The tower would overtake the 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai as the world’s tallest building when it is expected to be completed in 2018.

Work on the tower, which has been valued at 4.6 billion Saudi riyals (Dh4.5bn), officially started last April 1 after Jeddah Economic Company appointed the contractors Mace and EC Harris to work on the project.

In August 2011 Kingdom Holding struck a deal with Saudi Binladin, the world’s largest construction firm, , to build the tower and help to finance the project after various construction delays had led to speculation that the development had stalled.

Nabil Batrawi, the project director at Saudi Binladin, said, “We selected ACTS after a thorough evaluation of their capabilities and strength.”

Khaled Awad, the chairman of ACTS, said, “We will be investing our experience and knowledge to provide accurate, traceable and reliable test information in the largest mega-tall building in the world.”

Kingdom Tower is the centrepiece of a plan to build a 5.2 sq km new Kingdom City urban centre along the Red Sea coast.

“For super tall buildings testing materials like concrete and steel tends to occur on an ongoing basis,” said Mark Lavery, the associate director for tall buildings at Buro Happold Consulting Engineers. “Each concrete mix is tested for strength and stiffness, amongst other tests, and tested before construction starts to check that it can be pumped under pressure so that you can get it to the correct location … Materials tend to behave in pretty much the same sorts of ways at these altitudes, much of the problem is the difficulties in getting them up there.”