Mataf is the surrounding around the Kaba, center of the holiest mosque in Islam, located at the Grand Mosque of Mecca. It is at the place where the tawaf, the anti-clockwise circumambulation around the Kaba, takes place.

The Mataf expansion, is a large project planning to add 1,300,000 sqm to the existing 400,000 sqm of existing space. The renovation will feature a new basement and 3 additional floors, adding capacity for hundreds of thousands of additional worshippers.

For this very special project,Dextra Middle-East, has been involved in the supply of rebar couplers and anchor solutions.

Megacolumn

For the megacolummns, Dextra offered to contractors an opportunity to connect cages vertically, while coping for possible misalignment.This was done using Bartec Caging assemblies, which can perform a misalignment adjustment equivalent to one bar diameter.

While allowing reconnection, the Bartec Caging Assemblies were also used to temporarily lock the large column template (visible in red in photos) and guarantee the correct set up of column reinforcement.

Megacolumn footing

Dextra Bartec Headed Bars, which use the same type of threads as the couplers, were also installed at the footing of megacolumn as a way to cope with reinforcement congestion.

The anchors, compact and easy to set up, can be set on bars at the final stage of reinforcement installation. In that case, the anchors were installed from the top of the raft on the vertical bars.More than 100,000 Headed Bars were used on this type of applications during the project, those are visible as the X shape at the column footing.

Column-to-beam connections

For more standard applications, Bartec couplers were also used to perform the horizontal connections between columns and the beams.