Instrumentation & Monitoring on Dubai Creek Tower | United Arab Emirates

The Quintessential Tower

The tower at Dubai Creek Harbour will be located in the heart of Dubai, surrounded by the Dubai Creek Harbour ecosystem. Built to exceed all limits, this icon of the 21st century will be a new landmark in Dubai.

In order to mitigate risks during both construction and service periods, a dedicated instrumentation and monitoring system has been defined, while ascertaining that the establishment of a comprehensive database for the integration, storage, analysis, recording and processing of all monitored data is of paramount importance.

Sixense has been mandated by Soletanche-Bachy, in charge of the design and construction of the foundations, to implement a comprehensive monitoring system. Sixense then proceeded to instrument:

• the diaphragm wall
• 12 deep foundation barrettes for the main structure
• 16 barrettes of the Cable Array Foundations (CAF) system

700 sensors in the foundations

The foundation barrettes were instrumented with embedment strain gauges. Each barrette contains 5, 6 or 14 sections of 4 strain gauges, amounting for more than 400 sensors in the main foundation of the structure, and more than 300 sensors in the Cable Array Foundations (CAF). 4 of the latter barrettes were also instrumented with optical fibre for distributed strain measurements.

This system allows the real-time monitoring of the evolution over time of the stresses in the main foundation structure during the construction progress. In order to do so, a solar-panel powered data acquisition and transmission system was designed and commissioned at the beginning of August 2017. It has been run and maintained by Sixense ever since.

Sixense has also been providing periodic monitoring reports, and has granted the different actors of the project with live access to the monitoring data through its Web-based GIS software Geoscope.