Effect of Soil Settlement on Wall Cracks and Failures in the City of Shari, Saudi Arabia, Case Study

Abstract

This paper describes a case study for the causes of cracks and ruptures that emerged in the houses of the City of Shari, AlQassim region. The structures of this city built using the load wall bearings system. Loads of bearing masonry buildings usually have walls arranged at a fairly uniform spacing to carry gravity loads to the foundation without addition of columns. This study is divided to two parts; the first part discusses the field geotechnical investigation of the construction site. The second part presents the results of a parametric study for the effect of soil settlement as well as the positions and sizes of the wall openings on the existence of the wall cracks. The results showed that, the construction of houses almost at or very near to the ground surface with no rigid tie-beams under the walls which could help in resisting the differential settlement affects their safety. The opening definitely reduces the stiffness of the wall and subsequently reduces the failure load and increases deflection at the same load level. The finite difference-based code FLAC and the finite element-based code, ANSYS were used in the analysis.