World's tallest building. A living wonder. Stunning work of art. Incomparable feat of engineering.

BUILDING STRUCTURE
ASSIGNMENT 01

What influences me to choose

this building?
Being known as the tallest
building in the world, I wonder
how the structure can support
all loads and pressure up to the
sky while maintaining a simple
elegant design.

Official Name
Formerly Known
Built
Cost
Designed By
Developer
Type
No. of Stories
Maximum Height
Location

: Burj Khalifa Bin Zayed

: Burj Dubai
: 2004-2010
: $4,100,000,000
: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
: Emaar
: Skyscraper Mixed-Use (Mall, Residential And Retail Facilities)
: 206
: 2,717 Feet / 828 Meters
: Burj Dubai Boulevard, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

World Records
At over 828 metres (2,716.5 feet) and more than 160 stories, Burj Khalifa holds the following records:

Tallest building in the world

Tallest free-standing structure in the world

Highest number of stories in the world

Highest occupied floor in the world

Highest outdoor observation deck in the world

Elevator with the longest travel distance in the world

Tallest service elevator in the world

FLOOR
PLAN

Q1: What is the function of this building structure?

ANSWER:
The 280,000-square-meter skyscraper is a mixed-use project contains office, residential,
and retail space, along with a Giorgio Armani hotel.
Burj Khalifa is good for communication, hotel, observation, office, residential, retail,
entertainment, shopping, leisure and parking facilities.

At.mosphere, Burj Khalifa

Fine dining restaurant on level 122

At the Top, Burj Khalifa

Observation deck on level 124

The Residence
900 Burj Khalifa residences

The Corporate Suites

37 office floors

Armani Hotel & Residences Dubai

160 guestrooms and suites , 144 private residences

The inspiration for this building comes from the

regional desert Hymenocallis flower (as shown in
figure).
Just like the petals stretch outwards from the
stem, the wings of Burj Khalifa pull out from the
central core, giving an abstract Y form to the
building.
The design also incorporated the patterning
principles found in Islamic architecture.
The form of Burj Khalifa reflects Islamic
Architecture through the use of onion domes
when the building is viewed from the sky, or the
base.

Hymenocallis, also known as Spider Lily

(Organic Inspiration)

Q2: How would you classify this structure?

ANSWER:
Burj Khalifa is a mass structure as the concrete filled in the steel rebar to make it strong and
solidly built.

Q4: What type of materials are used?

ANSWER:
The casting of the whole structure is mainly done by two materials:
Concrete (About 250,000 m2 concrete was also used)
Steel (Over 30,000 tons of steel were used)

The reinforced concrete acts as the backbone of

the whole structure.
The concrete and steel skeleton is being
covered with a skin of glass, aluminum
and steel.
Thus, the overall materials of the structure are
glass, steel, aluminium, concrete and
reinforced.

Q3: List down and explain elements of structure in this chosen building.

1.

The design of the plan buttressed hexagonal

hub

The hub is where the elevators are located

and can be regarded as an axis preventing
twisting of the structure.
Each wing, with its own high performance
concrete corridor walls and perimeter
columns, buttresses the others via a six-sided
central core, or hexagonal hub.

According to the structural head of SOM

who were the structural engineers of Burj
Khalifa, a tapering Y shaped plan would be
the most efficient design for a skyscraper
and would occupy a lesser footprint
compared to say a rectangular block for the
same height.

2.

The Structural System

3.

There are corridor walls extending from the

hub and terminating in thickened hammerhead
walls, which behave similarly to the webs and
flanges of a beam to resist the wind shears and
moments. There also have some perimeter
columns and flat plate floor construction.
All of the vertical concrete is utilized to support
both gravity and lateral loads.
The tower is extremely stiff laterally and
torsionally.

Building Stepping

As the building spirals in height, the wings set back to provide many different floor
plates.
The setbacks are organized with the towers grid, such that the building stepping is
accomplished by aligning columns above with walls below to provide a smooth load
path.
This stepping and shaping of the tower has the effect of confusing the wind: wind
vortices never get organized over the height of the building because at each new tier the
wind encounters a different building shape.

4.

Vertical design of the structuretapered profile

The overall shape of the structure is slender at the top and wider at the base.
Such decision is suitable for resisting the shear and bending moment distributed on
the structure: the shear and bending moment accumulate from the top to the
bottom. And at the same time, such shape is wise when considering the whole
structure as a cantilever beam fixed in the ground, since it has larger size of the
internal moment arm and smaller forces in vertical members when providing the
same internal resisting moment.

5.

Foundation and Soil

The soil stratum of Dubai is very week so

they had to excavate up to 50m deep to get
a hard rock structure.
But the rock that they found was fragile
and saturated with ground water
194 piles were constructed for avoiding the
sinking of this structure.
The Tower is founded on a 3700mm thick
high performance reinforced concrete pile
supported raft foundation, which is in turn
supported by bored reinforced concrete
piles.
The raft foundation bottom and all sides
are protected with waterproofing
membrane.

6.

Podium

The Podium provides a base anchoring the tower to the ground, allowing on grade
access from three different sides to three different levels of the building.
Fully glazed entry pavilions constructed with a suspended cable-net structure provide
separate entries for the corporate suites at B1 and Concourse levels, the Burj Khalifa
residences at ground level and the Armani Hotel at Level 1.

* Podium: A platform that is used to raise something to a short distance above its surroundings.

Q9: How well does your structure resist all forces including tension,
compression, torsion and shear forces?
ANSWER:
The centre hexagonal reinforced concrete core walls provide the torsional resistance
of the structure similar to a closed tube or axle.
The centre hexagonal walls are buttressed by the wing walls and hammer head walls
which behave as the webs and flanges of a beam to resist the wind shears and
moments.
Outriggers at the mechanical floors allow the columns to participate in the lateral
load resistance of the structure; hence, all of the vertical concrete is utilized to
support both gravity and lateral loads.
The top section of the Tower consists of a
structural steel spire utilizing a diagonally
braced lateral system. The structural steel
spire was designed for gravity, wind, seismic
and fatigue. The exterior exposed steel is
protected with a flame applied aluminum
finish.

* Torsion: the act of twisting or the state of being twisted

Dead Load Calculation

Concrete //430,000 CY -> 11,610,000 CF X 145 LB/CF = 1,683,450,000 LB
Steel Reinforcement // 39,000 TON x 2000 LB/TON = 78,000,000 LB
Glass // 1,100,000 SF x 0.0328 FT x 185 LB/CF = 6,674,800 LB
Embossed Stainless Steel // 167,000 SF x 2.52 LB/SF = 420,840 LB
Dead Load = 1,811,687,392 LB
* Each material was given in a particular unit, then converted to pounds for use in load
calculation.
** Stainless Steel was assumed to be of gauge 16, the one found most often in buildings.
Live Load Calculation
Commercial Floor Area = 300,000 SF
Commercial Floor Load = 80 LB/SF x 300,000 SF = 24,000,000 LB
Residential Floor Area = 5,370,000 SF
Residential Floor Load = 40 LB/SF x 5,370,000 SF = 214,800,000 LB
Live Load = 238,800,000 LB
Foundation Load Calculation
Total Load = Dead Load + Live Load = 2,050,487,392 LB
Building Footprint = 80,000 SF
Foundation Load = Total Load / Building Footprint = 25,631 LB/SF
Horizontal Wind Load Calculation
Max Wind Speed = 68 MPH = 12 LB/SF
Building Face Area = 370,000 SF
Horizontal Load = Wind Speed*2 x Building Face Area = 8,880,000 LB
* Max wind speed was found from Dubai weather data, then doubled in the load calculation for
safety measures.
** Building face area was determined by dividing the amount of glass by the three outer faces
(as there was no recorded value).

Lateral Load Resistance System

Lateral load resistance is one of the dominant concerns for the design of Burj Dubai, which is
ambitiously to be the tallest building in the world. Tall buildings have to be capable of coping with
significant lateral forces, namely strong winds, and in the case of the Burj Dubai, seismic forces
too.
Every year the storm attacks Dubai
As the building grows much higher to the sky the
top will be badly affected by the wind
This causes a sway at the top floors of the
building

The towers lateral load resisting system

consists of high performance, reinforced
concrete ductile core walls linked to the
exterior reinforced concrete columns through
a series of reinforced concrete shear wall
panels at the mechanical levels.
Due to the limitation on the link beam
depths, ductile composite link beams are
provided in certain areas of the core wall
system.
These composite ductile link beams typically
consist of steel shear plates, or structural
steel built-up I-shaped beams, with shear
studs embedded in the concrete section.

The tower massing is also driven by wind engineering requirements to reduce dynamic wind
excitation. As the tower spirals into the sky, the buildings width and shape diminish, thus reducing
wind dynamic effects, movement, and acceleration. Integrating wind engineering principals and
requirements into the architectural design of the tower results in a stable dynamic response,
taming the powerful wind forces.

Gravity Load Resistance System

In the lower level, the concrete system(shear wall, column) is the main way to support the gravity
load, The wall thicknesses and column sizes were fine-tuned to reduce the effects of creep and
shrinkage on the individual elements which compose the structure.

Q5 & Q6: What types of fasteners/joints do they use in building structure?

ANSWER:
Joints that are used in this structure are adhesives, fastenings and melting (brazing).

Q7: What design problems did you run into during the research of this
structure?

ANSWER:
The most important building materiel of Burj Khalifa is reinforced concrete. A special
concrete was needed because of the high pressures of the building's weight and the
hot local climate. Persian Gulf temperatures that can reach 50 C (122 F). Any major
cracks could have caused a large amount of damage to the building.

Q8: How much do you think your structure is worth? Why?

ANSWER:
Burj Khalifa is worthy because this iconic building is more than just the tallest
building in the world, it is a work of structural art; it will serve as an important
benchmark in the fields of architecture and structural engineering for decades to
come. This iconic building symbolizes the aesthetic unison of many cultures from
Arabia and the rest of the world.

Q10: Any suggestion of the ways that can increase the stability of your
structure?

ANSWER:
The stability of Burj Khalifa is sufficient as the structure has undergo a lot of wind
tunnel testing and refining of the structural system.

Burj Khalifa has redefined what is possible in the design and engineering of supertall
buildings.
At the turn of the century, concrete construction was at its infancy and nobody then
could have dreamed of creating a building this tall using concrete.
The Burj Dubai project demonstrates that tall building system development is always
directly related to the latest developments in material technologies, structural
engineering theories, wind engineering, seismic engineering, computer technologies, and
construction methods. As of today, the Burj Dubai is the tallest man made structure in
the world in all categories, and it has become a catalyst for further development in
highrise construction in the Middle East and throughout the world.
The Burj Dubai project is another step forward in the world of architecture.