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PETRONAS, short for Petroliam National Bhd, is Malaysia's national petroleum corporation
established on 17 August 1974.
Since its incorporation PETRONAS has grown to be an integrated international oil and gas
company with business interests in 35 countries. As at end of March 2004, the PETRONAS
Group comprised 93 wholly-owned subsidiaries, 19 partly-owned outfits and 55 associated
companies.
The project is an integral part of the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC), a carefully planned
development to provide the capital city with an efficient and modern centre for urban
activity, trade and commerce encircling a vast, open green lung. It brought together the
world's leading practitioners of engineering, building technology and construction.
Construction planning began in January 1992. By March 1993, the excavators were hard at
work digging down to 30 meters below the surface of the site.
The extent of excavation required over 500 truck-loads of earth to be moved every night.
The next stage was the single largest and longest concrete pour in Malaysian history: 13,200
cubic meters of concrete was continuously poured through a period of 54 hours for each
tower. This record-breaking slab, together with 104 piles forms the foundation for each of the
towers.
From this floor rose a 21-metre high retaining wall, with a perimeter length of over 1 kilometer.
This concrete shell and the basement area it enclosed required two years of up to 40 workers
on site all day and night.
The final product is the basement car park offering a total of 5,400 parking bays on five levels
beneath the podium wrapping the towers.
As an added consideration, two different contractors were chosen for each tower to allow
cross-monitoring of construction values and techniques – with one coming to the aid of the
other should problems arise.
The construction of the superstructure commenced in April 1994, after rigorous tests and
simulations of wind and structural loads on the design.
The 'composite' structure of the Towers employs both the flexibility of steel and the rigidity of
high-strength concrete.
Each component material was used to best effect in constructing the 452 m-high buildings.
About 80,000 cubic meters of high strength concrete with 37,000 tons of steel were used to
form the frames of both Towers.
Of particular importance was maintaining the verticality of the structures throughout the full
height as they were being built. The reason for this, besides reinforcing the aesthetic design,
was to ensure structural load integrity and the safe passage of the high-speed double-decker
elevators.
The determination of verticality was monitored by international specialist surveyors who, with
the aid of global positioning systems, checked alignments every day and every night. The
same surveyor used the same instrument at the same time in every 24 hours, thereby
minimizing any element of differences in judgment.
Construction works were done primarily at night and finishing works were done primarily
during the day (to minimize the cost of artificial lighting). As a result, the entire management
and construction team redefined the Malaysian industry standard of 'fast-track'.
The PETRONAS Twin Towers were finally encased in steel and glass and could be viewed as
complete in June 1996.
The construction process also drew extensively from the local industry, with the finished towers
having over 60 percent local material content.
Moreover, soil tests showed that the bedrock under both towers started shallow, 15m down,
but sloped sharply to more than 180m.
To support the immense weight, a depth of 21m (as high as a five-storey!) would have to be
excavated for the basement. This also meant penetrating the bedrock at one end but not
the other.
The contract for the foundation works was awarded to a consortium of French and local
companies, Dragages-Bachy-First Nationwide Sdn Bhd.
Every step of preparing the foundation was a technological breakthrough, says Arlida Ariff,
then the planning manager of the overall KLCC project.
"To dig the foundation, we didn't use hammering in the conventional sense. Instead we
excavated the ground using a combined technique of piling and raft foundation (like a big
concrete slab); it was the first time the latter technique was being used in the country.
"With this technique, when you bore the piles in, instead of circular piles, rectangular or
barrette ones were used. Barrette piles are bigger than circular piles, so we could put in fewer
number of piles. This also increases the safety margin and poses fewer problems.
"That's because the bigger the pile is, the smaller the number we have to put in and the
better its ability to withstand tension.
"Water was then used to clean and keep the bored hole intact until we poured the concrete
in. Until a certain depth, drilling mud or bentonite (a kind of "clayish" liquid)
was used instead of water as it was a stronger substance which could do the job more
effectively in deeper parts," explains Arlida who's now the general manager of KLCCB and
project management consultant for Putrajaya Holdings Sdn Bhd.