Monitoring for Abu Dhabi International Airport | United Arab Emirates

The Midfield Terminal Complex development

Abu Dhabi International Airport is expected to handle 20 million passengers over the next few years. The Midfield Terminal Complex (MTC), conveniently named as it will sit between the two existing runways, was constructed to cope with this increasing passenger traffic.
The complex is designed to be an architectural wonder, and the largest structure in the Abu Dhabi Emirate. Its construction is part of Plan Abu Dhabi 2030, the urban structure framework plan aimed at ensuring the growth and sustainability of Abu Dhabi as a business, tourism centre and global capital city.

The need for real-time monitoring

The ground beneath the site includes fill material, predominantly made of silty to very silty sands, over a solid gypsum, mudstone and siltstone bedrock.

After key parts of the Midfield Terminal Complex had already been built, excessive settlements were noticed. Bauer, then, was contracted to carry out soil improvement and mitigate the risks created by the presence of loose soils under the main part of the building, as well as sewer and stormwater anholes and utility lines in the MTC construction area. Permeation grout treatment technique was chosen to increase the strength and stiffness of the fill material immediately below the structure and its utility lines.

Grouting activities, if not meticulously controlled, can result in the heave, or even the settlement of adjacent structures. The presence of strategic stormwater lines, as well as several sewerage pipes, required a level of control and precision that only real-time monitoring at a high instrumentation density could provide during grouting activities. Five horizontal Shape Acceleration Array or 4DShape were supplied, and a dedicated engineer from Sixense remained on site to proceed with the commissioning in the utilities to be monitored and the further reinstallations in other locations as grouting activities progressed on site. The data was provided in real-time to all project stakeholders using Sixense Web-based GIS software Geoscope.