Barrette Piles in Foundation System of Petronas Twin Tower : Part 1

Petronas Twin Tower is a 452 m high skyscraper located in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. These great structures (twin towers) were tallest building of world until Taipei 101 was built. 

As foundation system is concerned, we will first discuss about the foundation system and then we will go to the piling types. Geotechnical investigation explored that the actual construction of these mega structures was on soft rock and decayed limestone. Both occupied almost equal portions of construction site. Then engineers were decided to relocate the structure to be sat it on entirely soft rock and moved it to around 61 meter to achieve this. 104 nos piles of an average 125 m piles were used to reach deep bed rock which made it having deepest foundation system of the world.

The single stage largest and longest concrete pouring of the history of Malaysia was conducted to embed this huge number of piles to form a raft from which a retaining wall of 21 meter was raised along a perimeter of more than 1000 meter. The raft had a giant thickness of 4.6 meters having weight of 32500 tonnes. This record was hold unbroken till 2007 in respect of largest pour. The raft comprised 13200 cum of concrete which required 54 hours to pour for each tower.