Assessment of the Seismic Safety of an Ancient Building in Algarve

Abstract

The assessment of the seismic safety of ancient buildings is of especial importance in the scope of the conservation and rehabilitation of the built heritage in the Algarve region, besides the own security of the users, since it is one of the areas of greater seismic risk in mainland Portugal. However, it is increasingly evident the poor quality of the construction materials often used and especially the natural degradation they have suffered over the years. Thus, based on the large number of existing buildings, there is a motivation to study the seismic vulnerability of a typical building of the region in order to evaluate if it presents an appropriate seismic behavior and may constitute a sustainable solution for the future. The goal of the present work is to verify the seismic safety of a masonry structure in this case an ancient building located in Tavira, based on a non-linear static analysis (pushover), using for this purpose the commercial software 3Muri. The pushover analysis considers the evolution of the structure versus the lateral actions, representing its behavior in all phases of request and displacement, through capacity curves, until it reaches collapse. The structural modeling procedure of the case study is based on macro-element methodologies that simulate the response of masonry panels using simplified formulations of resistance domains for the critical sections of each macro-element.