PSI - Issue 52

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Rakesh Katam et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 52 (2024) 72–88 Rakesh Katam/ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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As a result, several structures — including historical, commercial, public buildings, and other infrastructures are deteriorating much faster than anticipated due to a lack of maintenance (Garg et al. (2022)). As a solution to this problem, building health can be evaluated utilizing destructive, non-destructive, and sensor-based investigations (Helal et al. (2015)). Former helps with local structural health assessment, whereas advanced methods help with a global structure health assessment (Yelisetti et al. (2022)). This study seeks to understand the global behavior and reasons for the failure to provide relevant recommendations for a residential building to enhance its load-carrying capacity and its intended design life (Aseem et al. (2019)) shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Location of a residential building.

The residential building considered for the present study had multiple structural element failures, to which a detailed study has been carried out in a systematic way as shown in Fig. 2. This building's construction was carried out in three stages. The first level of the RCC structure was built in 1983, the top two levels were raised later in 2010, and the brickwork on the elevated floors was completed around 2016. The floor plan is a simple rectangle with dimensions of 7.70 m x 16.85 m with a maximum height of 12 m above the ground level, with the first story and subsequent levels measuring 3.0 m each in floor height. The foundation is set 1.5 meters below ground level. The extension of the building has been carried out without the involvement of engineers and extra loads, such as filling sand to lay the flooring, were carried out during the building of the first and second levels. Even if the columns above ground level appear to be in fine condition, the building's ground-level columns begin to crack as the dead loads on the top levels increased. As time passed, the cracks in the columns kept growing, which leads to structural distress. The general behavior of the structure was examined using standard procedures and Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods were performed with the reference given by the author Verma et al. (2013) and the exact condition of the structure has been ascertained using the following method given by Yenigalla et al. (2021).