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 | | UPONOR PIPES UP TO THE CHALLENGE AT DUBAI’S PALM | | | Uponor Infrastructure UK | | 30/04/2008 | | | Uponor’s international expertise is proving a significant benefit to the spectacular Palm Jumeirah, off Dubai’s coast, as products from Uponor UK, Germany and Sweden have been supplied for both the vast infrastructure project and for the hotels, shops and private properties being constructed.
Uponor Infrastructure UK has supplied a substantial amount of potable and non-potable polyethylene (PE 100) pipes for The Palm, including 80km of HPPE pipe in diameters between 160mm and 1200mm for the spectacular Atlantis hotel and aqua-park. Uponor International is also supplying products from its multi-layered composite pipe system (MLCP) for tap water installation.
Black high performance PE 100 pipe was selected for the infrastructure due to the extremes of heat, construction demands and welding requirements, and its characteristics of flowability, abrasion and corrosion resistance, long service life and quality. The first (and at the time, record-breaking) project on the Palm Jumeirah involved micro-tunnelling 12 shots of 500mm PE 100 SDR 11 19 metres below the sea bed, each 900 metres in length. Six shots each side of the Palm’s Crescent had to have centres with a tolerance of 450mm and a 355mm SDR 11 PE 100 pipe inserted the whole length of each shot. These 355mm lines carry services for potable water, gas, communications ducts and treated sewerage effluent lines.
The world’s largest fish tank at Atlantis holds 53 million litres of salt-water. Both freshwater and salt-water piping was required, and Uponor has supplied pipes with diameters from 25mm to 1200mm, including over 15 km of 355mm pipe in SDR 11 and SDR 17 densities, plus specially made electrofusion couplers and joints.
Ground-Breaking Directional Drilling
The pipework and mechanical systems structure for The Atlantis formed a significant element of the construction process. One of the biggest early challenges to this project was directionally drilling 19 metres beneath the seabed through compacted sand and then pulling through 1000mm diameter Uponor pipe in 400m sections for three seawater intakes. Tim Perkins of Uponor commented: “We’ve manufactured pipes to handle daily water volumes for the equivalent of a town the size of York; it’s been a huge but highly successful project.”
Several of the hotel’s en-suite rooms have views onto a massive aquarium rising from reception through several levels, with pipework also supplied by Uponor. Uponor is currently working with the consortia planning infrastructure packages for the second and third islands, the Palm Deira and the Palm Jebel Ali, including Dubai’s new water front, now rising from the sea. | |
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