Sonkar Hilton Hotel is the tallest steel building in Turkey and Europe as a structure constructed totally of steel as its structural system being constructed with steel. It is formed in three blocks. Total construction area is 28 700 sq m of which 15 400 sq m reinforced concrete and 13 300 sq m steel. Main block is a 32 storey structure made of three reinforced concrete basement floors and twenty nine steel floors. Steel construction super structure’s HD type columns pass through basement columns and sit on the mat foundation. Thus, columns are made as composite that provides optimum sized columns in the basement. In order to supply the connection between concrete and steel in columns, shear studs were automatically welded to the flanges and the webs of HD type columns. At the main block steel construction was measured as 2500 tons. Block B is of reinforced of concrete which is three basement floors and one ground floor making it 4 storeys high. Block C comprises of 4 basement floors, a ground floor and in total 5 storeys made of reinforced concrete. The architectural design is made by URASXDİLEKÇİ Architects.
Sonkar Hilton Hotel’s structural system is of two parts: reinforced concrete and steel.
Blocks B and C are reinforced concrete and Block A basement floors are reinforced concrete while the ground and upper floors are designed as steel structure. In the reinforced concrete sections, frames and shear walls are designed according to the Turkish Seismic Provisions (TDY 2007) as highly ductile. Vertical loads in steel structure were carried by columns formed by HISTAR profiles of HD type and S460 quality.
The building is designed according to first degree seismic zone criteria based on TDY 2007 requirements, for siesmic load and magnitude with the 10% possibility of being surpassed in 50 years period.
Performance analysis results show that the building comprises with TDY2007 Section 7 criteria for “Life Safety”.
Sonkar Hilton Hotel steel manufacturings were done at GÜLERMAK A.ş’s GÖLBAşI/ANKARA plant spread over 56 000 m?, modernized with equipments following the rapidly developing technologies in the world.
Manufactured steels were prepared for the erection at a paint station of EN standards with special heating and airing systems, under supervision of paint controllers trained abroad.
Erection is done by using 16 ton Potain tower crane. 29 storey building’s columns up to the 7th floor each weigh approximately 16 tons. As the building height rises column cross sections get smaller and the weights descend to 8.5 tons. Building’s column to column connections are welded and the rest of the connections (column to beam/beam to beam/brace to beam) are bolted. In the whole building starting from M16 up to M30 different sized approximately 65 000 pieces of bolt have been used which are of the pretensioned 10.9 quality used in regions necessitating high resistance. The torque tool used at the site for torqueing the bolts are calibrated regularly by Skidmore-Wilhelm apparatus each day before the task of torqueing begins according to the necessary pretension forces applied to the bolts.