Systematic Evaluation and Assessment of Existing Building for Storey Extension: A Case Study

Abstract

Urbanization is a need of this developing era but rapid growth has led to the problems of urban sprawl, ribbon development, unregulated development, high cost for urban infrastructure and pollution due to the inadequate disposal of urban and industrial waste. As we know that, India is a second largest population country in the world and population required land to fulfil their basic need as a shelter. To minimize the problem of land, there is a need to explore/developed a vertical extension of buildings. Vertical growth is capitalizing the remaining buildable space which can be utilized from many older buildings. At the     same time, engineer can focus on the refurbishes the housing block and improves standards of energy efficiency, safety, and accessibility of the existing building as per the revised codal provisions. The literature has shown various measures/techniques for strengthening/retrofitting of existing structure for the floor expansion. Before going for vertical extension to any structure, there is a need to check the strength and stability of existing structure through structural audit (physical verification and NDT- correlating strength). After structural auditing, engineers/designers will have the reference data about desired strength to available strength and load carrying capacity of existing building. The main aim of this paper is present a case study regarding how the task of ascertain the decision making for storey extension over existing building located in Amravati (Seismic Zone II), Maharashtra, India was conducted. The findings are presented in this paper can be taken as an idea/methodology to perform an evaluation of existing structure by performing NDT procedures which would be useful to make decisions on the basis of available limited data and constraints of projects, rather than demoralizing the potential of project in spite of having sufficient available strength of the building to withstand the storey extension.