CLIENT Emirates Float Glass, Dubai, UAE
ARCHITECTURE aei progetti
STRUCTURE aei progetti
PROCESS LINE IANUA
GENERAL CONTRACTOR IANUA
DESIGN 2006-2007
REALIZATION 2007-2008
PLOT AREA 32 ha
AREA 76.000 sqm
VOLUME 565.000 cum
TOTAL COST 112 mio €
CIVIL WORK COST 26 mio €
Mussafah industrial area (south of Abu Dhabi) was built in the sea by means of monumental hydraulic engineering interventions and huge earthmovings. Such area houses all local industrial activities and is involved in a business plan that will make it an extremely important international centre in a few years. Emirates Float Glass commissioned the first of several important glass plant with ‘float’ technology under PPG license. Following this system, the glass leaves the furnace and immediately ‘floats’ over molten tin like oil on water, hence avoiding any mechanical interaction with the forming sheet and guaranteeing an extremely high quality.
The plant, designed for a 600 tons/day production, covers an almost 30 ha area, and mainly consists of a series of buildings intended to house the different working-premises: the furnace, where all raw materials (as sand, dolomite and limestone etc.), previously stocked in specific warehouses, are conveyed; the tin-bath room; the annealing-lehr where the glass-sheet gradually stiffens by a cooling process; the 50.000 sqm warehouse where the cutting line is housed and the glass sheets are stocked. The complex has an almost 300 m length and the different buildings housing high technology systems are realized, in their elevation part, with steel bearing-structures covered with full metal-sheets, with long span beams in order not to interfere with productive-process plants.
The basement parts are all r.c. structures made of highly waterproof concrete to withstand the harmful action of chlorides and sulfates in the area.
Main and heavier buildings’ foundations are all realized by means of bored piles in order to reach the limestone bank in the area through the highly compressible superficial layers.
For all other buildings a stone-column solution that significantly improved soil’s mechanical characteristics, was provided.