Ain Dubai

The challenge

At 250 metres the wheel had no directly comparable precedent to design against. Arrangements that are well understood at half that diameter — rim depth, spoke tension, hub geometry, cabin suspension — do not scale linearly, and each has to be re-established rather than extrapolated.

The site is a reclaimed island in the Arabian Gulf. That sets the foundation problem, the marine and thermal environment the steelwork has to survive, and the logistics of moving very large fabricated sections to a site reached by a single causeway.

The structure had to be assembled and raised through a long sequence of temporary conditions, each of which loads the incomplete wheel differently from the finished one.

Engineering approach

The wheel was delivered by a contracting group rather than a single party. Starneth Engineering and Hyundai Engineering & Construction were appointed as design and construction contractors, and the complete wheel structure — including the installation engineering — was designed and engineered by KCI.

That division of responsibility is the substantive point about this project. On a wheel at this scale the interfaces between structural design, installation engineering and construction execution are where the risk concentrates, and they were carried by named parties with defined scopes rather than absorbed into a single undifferentiated contract.

The wheel entered service in October 2021 and operates as a visitor attraction on Bluewaters Island.