PINNACLE
Adds Certainty To The World’s Tallest Building Under Construction With Autodesk
CIVIL ENGINEERING
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Introduction
Pinnacle Infotech has been providing BIM engineering services to architects, engineers, and contractors globally. The company has over 30 years experience of adding certainty to AEC, and has successfully completed 7500+ landmark projects including the world’s tallest skyscraper under construction, in Jeddah.
Creating innovative building designs and doing efficient information modeling in a construction project like the iconic Jeddah Tower, which is one of the world’s tallest buildings under construction, is fairly challenging.
"We saved almost 30-40% of our time. It would be impossible to have met the challenging schedule without the BIM workflow. It resulted in 20% cost savings for us and much more for the owners as we could optimize the design”
—BIMAL PATWARI, Founder & CEO of Pinnacle Infotech
Jeddah tower project
Some amazing facts that make the Jeddah Tower project overwhelming are:
- It was to be built covering an area of 457,840 square meters
- The height of the tower is over 1000 meters from the ground level
- The tower will have more than 250 floors
- At a height of 630 meters from the ground level, the tower has the world’s highest observation deck with a 98 feet diameter outdoor balcony
- The tower will have 59 elevators including 5 double-deck elevators and 12 escalators across 200 levels of construction
- Building it required more steel than what is needed to build 7 Eiffel towers
- About 23-hectare (57 acres) area around the Jeddah Tower will have public space, a shopping mall, and residential-cum-commercial developments.
Jeddah tower project
Building a tower that is more than the half-a-mile high from ground level can present great unforeseen challenges that can potentially overrun costs and project delivery schedules. Autodesk’s state-of-the-art software, Revit along with AutoCAD and 3ds Max, provided the much-needed foresight to project engineers while creating designs that were optimized for MEFP services with spacecraft-grade accuracy, thereby eliminating rework entirely.
Realizing the unimaginable
At a height of 630 meters from the ground, creating the world’s highest observation deck demands certainty to the last millimeter - zero room for errors and negligible scope for rework! For fixing any defect (in case of a design error), it would take 4 hours for a lift to deliver sub-assemblies, repair, and replacement material; making rework prohibitively expensive & time-consuming.
Autodesk’s suite – AutoCAD, Revit & 3Ds Max – not only supplemented Pinnacle’s efforts of creating flawless designs but also helped in improving the project turnaround times significantly.
With no drilling allowed post its concrete casting, every single wall penetration had to be planned months before the tower’s construction. Autodesk tools helped Pinnacle in minutely detailing and coordinating every design that eliminated any uncertainties that could have led to cost and time overruns. With 5925 shop drawings and 1255 builders' work drawings for more than 83 floors, seamless communication between a team of 40 project engineers were the key. With the help of Autodesk’s tech suite, Pinnacle was able to combine their project experience with global BIM practices to bring precision in Jeddah Tower’s designs.
The road from uncertainty to precision
While doing MEP designing for such iconic buildings, the most common reason for failure can be ‘uncertainty’. The entire MEP scope can get severely complicated if the building structure is as unique as the Jeddah Tower and has a limited ceiling space with restricted maneuverability.
AUTODESK SOFTWARE TOOLS PROVIDED DESIGNING PRECISION AND YIELDED KEY BENEFITS LIKE:
- Months before the construction stage, Pinnacle used Revit to roll out MEP designs with 100 percent accuracy and certainty
- Costly clashes between mechanical ducts and rebars were avoided
- AutoCAD and 3Ds Max helped overcome several structural challenges concerning exterior designs, especially making the smooth slope facade of the building functional, provisions for wind and storms at the height of 700 meters, etc.
- Over 40000 service clashes were avoided helped reduce 3 to 4 hours of rework per clash
- Over 1000 RFIs were raised for resolving missing data, conflicts, constructability, aesthetic, maintenance, and accessibility issues
- Significant reduction in material wastage was realized thereby reducing environmental impact – around 37 meters of cable tray, 100 ft sheet metal, and 25 hangers were saved due to smart routing of services without violating the core design
- Pinnacle could offer value engineering services – from point of view of sustainability it became possible to cut down on wasted energy potential thus bringing down the energy impact and power draw of the Jeddah Tower
- Pinnacle could do the largest range of external static pressure calculations for the Jeddah Tower with near perfection.
The management team at the Jeddah Tower also lauded Pinnacle’s precision.
"Pinnacle did an excellent job of deputing a large, experienced team of BIM Engineering professionals on-site and in their production centers. They redesigned the complete MEP services based on our updated requirements which helped us in material finalization and procurement. Identifying the constructability issues in the pre-construction stage saved us all the rework and costs”
—ZIAD ABOUL HOSN, Project Director, MEP, Jeddah Tower
A super savings bonanza
Pinnacle was successful in reducing the project costs by about USD 180 million, a staggering 15 percent of the total project cost. To top this up, they were successful in saving about 40 percent time on the project delivery schedule.
