Structural Remediation of Unreinforced Brick Masonry Walls of Heritage Palace Building with Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymers

A sprawling palace complex built in the year circa. 1893 and belonging to the Nizam family, rulers of the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad in India, is currently being developed as a luxury heritage palace hotel by a leading hotel group from India. Various functional buildings are integrated to form the palace complex of around 940,000 square meters area. The original construction of the palace features mainly of a load bearing masonry structure comprising of burnt brick masonry with lime mortar. Years of disuse and exposure to environmental vagaries had resulted in various distresses to the structures. The present developers thought it prudent to conduct a structural audit of the palace complex to assess the present condition of the various structures. Subsequent to a structural audit, it was noted that, amongst other anomalies, various sections of the load bearing masonry walls of various buildings were non-compliant to the allowable values of slenderness ratios. This necessitated certain remediation measures to the deficient masonry wall panels. A remediation scheme using carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) bands as localised intermediate stiffeners onto the walls was found appropriate and thus adopted considering various advantages it offered. This paper describes the site case study on the installation of a particular proprietary CFRP system in achieving the desired objective of carrying out structural remediation of masonry walls.