Vaults are fundamentally strong structures, however, they are particularly susceptible to forced deformation. The 15th century Gothic quire at Bothwell Parish Church is an example of the type of imposed deformations a barrel vault might experience. The vault and its supporting walls exhibit extensive deformation due to ground movement. Failure patterns give insight into the stress distribution and redundancies of a structural system. This information can be used to help diagnose specific problems in structures or predict locations where intervention techniques will be necessary. By isolating a barrel vault’s response to a particular type of deformation, the resulting failure pattern can be defined. This study was undertaken to further the current understanding of the effects of differential settlement on the structural response of a pointed barrel vault. This research explores the pathology and collapse modes of pointed barrel vaults under asymmetric linear vertical displacement through experimental investigation, and assesses the suitability of fibre reinforced polymers (FRP) as a strengthening method for improving the stability of a pointed barrel vault like that at Bothwell.
A principal reason of damage in historic masonry vaults consists in relative displacements of the vaults' abutments. Excluding the case of seismic-induced damage, cracks are often produced by differential settlements generated by the lateral wall instability or soil degradation (e.g. due to stress concentrations, non-uniform soil stratigraphy, flooding phenomena etc.). When dealing with historic vaults, the effects of long-term deformation processes cannot often be linked directly to causes, which may also be unknown. In this paper, the effects of differential settlements on historic masonry barrel vaults are investigated. An efficient 3D contact-based model was developed to reproduce experiments on a scaled pointed barrel vault (representative of a typology of late-medieval barrel vaults in Scotland) under non-uniform differential settlement. Firstly, the numerical model is used to simulate the experimental campaign, achieving good agreement in terms of crack pattern (longitudinal shear) and transverse-longitudinal deformation profiles. Then, further analyses are carried out to gain insight on the effects of several plausible uniform and non-uniform settlement patterns on representative historic barrel vaults. Various settlement configurations were analysed and complex failure patterns observed. This study could help analysts in understanding the nature of ongoing deformation process in historic masonry vaults and engineers in the design of strengthening strategies.
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