The Vida Mall on Plot 132-133 Downtown Development is a twin-tower comprising of 195 hotel rooms, and 614 serviced residences, along with a seven storey retail podium that links both the towers. The luxurious project is located at the edge of Downtown Dubai and connected to the Dubai Mall through a dedicated link bridge.
The building movements of structural elements in high rise designs are an important consideration for design and construction. At the proposed Vida Mall Project, it was important to determine the effects of the building movements and anticipating these movements (which occur during construction and in long term) in order to avoid any adverse affect on the performance of the structure.
This included monitoring building movements such as foundation settlement, axial shortening as well as creep and shrinkage (of concrete and composite elements). Further, the project was monitored for parameters like deflection, thermal movements (during construction), movements (due to construction loads), thermal movements, etc.
Encardio-rite’s sister concern Encardio-rite Geosystems LLC in UAE was awarded I&M sub-contract for the turnkey monitoring solutions that included:
- Supply, installation and monitoring of geotechnical instruments
- Establishment, measurements and maintenance of survey network
- Early warning through continuous settlement monitoring of raft slab
- Survey of slab edge profiles, core walls verticality and other verticality
- Monitoring building movements by supplying, installing, and monitoring various geotechnical and survey instruments during entire construction period
- Manual and automatic monitoring
- Weekly & monthly reporting with evaluation & interpretation
Geotechnical instruments used for monitoring and surveying during construction activity included:
- Tilt Meters To measure inclination or tilt monitoring of both the towers.
- Strain Gauges To measure structural strain.
- Prism Target Fixed monitoring targets were installed to monitor 3D movements (x, y, and z).
- Surface Settlement Points Installed on the raft, to monitor the foundation settlement during the construction phase.
- Building Settlement Points Installed on the structure column, to measure vertical settlement.
- GNSS Receivers To measure primary and secondary network.
- Digital Level To measure primary and secondary network.
Dataloggers were used for automatic collection and transmission of data of geotechnical sensor. Robotic total station were used to automatically collect and transmit data from prism targets.
