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RMD Kwikform has worked on such technically challenging projects as the New Doha International Airport.

Increased construction activity in Al Ain has prompted formwork specialist Doka Gulf FZE to recently host a technical presentation and live demonstration at the Rotana Hotel.

The event attracted contractors, consultants and Al Ain municipality officials. The presentation was followed by a live demonstration of a Staxo 40 load-bearing tower, which was erected by Doka’s UAE site-supervision team.

“Guests were impressed with the ultimate built-in safety features and system stability, plus the significantly larger slab area covered by Staxo 40,” commented Doka Gulf FZE product manager Gerald Hoermann.

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Staxo 40 can be set up much more quickly than single-leg shoring towers, as these often have up to 32% more weight and up to 78% more separate parts, which slow down assembly.

“This is a crucial advantage when it comes to shoring large areas faster and more efficiently,” said Hoermann. He added that the gapless, full-area work decks inside and between the towers provide safe workplace access, and speed up assembly operations.

“Once assembled, the completed tower can cover a slab area four times larger than a traditional scaffolding system,” said Hoermann.

In latest developments, Doka has clinched the formwork contract for the 123-storey 555m-high Lotte World Premium Tower in Seoul, South Korea. Scheduled for completion in 2014, it will be the tenth tallest building in the world, pushing Toronto’s CN Tower out of the top ten.

The client, Lotte Construction, rated the Doka concept as the “technically most sophisticated and best-quality formwork solution.” The formwork solution adapts more or less “on its own” to the numerous changes in the cross-section.

Quite apart from the core’s formidable height, its complex shape presents another set of challenges. In front-elevation view, the core break breaks down into three sections that are roughly equal in height, but which are completely different geometrically.

From August, the Doka SKE100 climbing formwork system will be setting the pace on this cast-in-place (CIP) concrete core, raising 2,500m2 of large-area Top 50 formwork and three placing booms, with the aid of 117 SKE100 automatic climbers.

To enable the slab-forming work in the top four storeys of the rising core to take place under optimum safety conditions, sheltered from the weather, the self-climbing Doka Xclimb 60 protection screen will be deployed.

This gapless enclosure of the under-construction storeys has to adapt to the decreasing circumference automatically – that is, without needing any time-consuming modifications.

In order to achieve this, the climbing profiles (which are normally arranged in parallel), are mounted at an acute angle to one another, so that the individual elements of the protection screen can move automatically into one another on rollers during the climbing operation.

Gigantic CIP concrete pillars known as mega columns run up the exterior of the structure. Between the first and last casting steps, the quadratic cross-section tapers from 3.5m to 2m.