Abstract
The subject of this work is the Sant’Agostino Sanctuary in Offida (Italy); we investigated both the dynamic behavior and the seismic vulnerability of the complex, used nowadays in its parts as school building, oratory, and church. Offida is in central Italy; the village has been severely damaged by the last seismic events of 2016. The sanctuary was heavily damaged by the earthquake of 24 August 2016. We recurred to finite elements to estimate the vulnerability of the sanctuary and its dynamic response, considering masonry’s nonlinear behavior by means of proper constitutive assumptions. To estimate how the monastery bears the lateral loads related to the expected demands resulting from seismic actions (N2 method) using nonlinear static analysis (Pushover), we recurred to a homogenized material and smeared cracking and crushing constitutive law. As may be remarked by observing buildings that share the same features of the sanctuary and, moreover, by comparing seismic demand vs. capacity, the structure is prone to massive damage leading to collapse. The paper underlines how advanced numerical analysis grants fundamental data on how historical masonry buildings behave under seismic action, providing a method that may easily be implemented at historic monasteries in Europe.
Highlights
The intense seismic activity that affected many areas of Italy over the last decades clearly showed how much care should be taken of architectural heritage and its preservation
The analyses were carried out using the horizontal components of different natural response spectra obtained from the time histories recorded near the city of Offida, with the objective of both assessing the damage caused to the sanctuary by the intense seismic activity affecting central Italy from august 2016 and evaluating the horizontal strength capacity
The 3D non-linear solid numerical model (NM) described in this paper gave the chance to investigate the seismic behavior of the complex using sensitivity analysis performed by varying control points and stiffness of the floors
Summary
The intense seismic activity that affected many areas of Italy over the last decades clearly showed how much care should be taken of architectural heritage and its preservation. Starting from a careful seismic phenomena observation that leads to pointing out how cracks and failure modes mostly concentrate in recurrent elements, piers and spandrels may be seen as the two main structural components, especially when it comes to analyzing the in-plane response of complex masonry walls with openings Another frequently used approach provides for the use of finite elements schemes to model masonry structures as they were continuous; current literatures offers recurrent examples of how this modeling strategy may be applied with ease to historical buildings, such as monasteries (Lourenço et al, 2007; Betti and Vignoli, 2008a), churches (Betti and Vignoli, 2008b; Milani and Valente, 2015; Clementi et al, 2017a; Formisano et al, 2018), bridges (Betti et al, 2008), steeples or towers (D’Ambrisi et al, 2012; Minghini et al, 2014; Carpinteri et al, 2015), ancient city centers (Formisano et al, 2015).
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