Author(s): Mushtaque Amed Pathan, Maryam Maira, Arif Khaskheli and Agha Jamshed

Abstract: The Building construction throughout world faces the defects from normal to heay and destructive like cracks and fractures which cause damages and finally collaps to heavy life losses along with economical and financial. The crack like strictures are found in wall and columns also. For the purpose of study the international experts have classified the minimum allowable standards of these defects which may not be harmful to buildings and people living there. This research study has been carried out to investigate the main reasons to investigate the causes of cracks in a newly completed and used buildings in where some distinct cracks appeared immediately and after some years. Oftenly these cracks seem in almost in walls and other structural elements such as columns and beams, with different patterns. The general methods consisting of reconnaissance survey; building inspection and laboratory testing were used to investigate the causes of these detrimental cracks. By the use of reconnaissance survey, factors that may lead to formation of cracks were considered and analyzed. The width, pattern and conditions of the cracks were identified during the building inspection stage and the soil properties related to the creation of cracks were determined during the laboratory test. Based on the outcome of the study; there is no evidence of factors such as a matured system that may lead to the creation of cracks in the building; all the cracks are active cracks with their width increasing with time and the soils in the entire block of the building possessed high percentage of fine materials with high moisture content and plasticity indices. The pore water pressure in this type of soil takes longer time to vanish, which can be expressed by very low value of the coefficient of permeability (1.90x 10-7 to 2.15 x 10-7 m/s) acquired from different soil samples collected from the study area. Hence the cracks in this type of building were found to be caused by the settlement of the building due to the nature of the predominant soil type that was found in the study area.

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