A knowledge-based approach for the structural assessment of cultural heritage, a case study: La Sapienza Palace in Pisa

Abstract

The full knowledge of the morphological evolution of an historical masonry building, defined more as ‘structural aggregate’ than as ‘single construction’, together with the analysis of the architectural, structural, geological and geotechnical aspects, allow the assessment of the static safety and seismic vulnerability of the complex and the design of retrofit interventions. In the present paper, a Knowledge-Based-Approach is applied to the historical building ‘Palazzo La Sapienza’ in Pisa, allowing to provide reliable results concerning the actual structural condition of the building avoiding the strong computational effort usually associated to the execution of refined numerical analyses. In case of complex buildings, characterized by a high heterogeneity of materials, structural typologies, geometries and so on, the adoption of a global model is not always useful to represent the effective structural behaviour. The proposed approach shows how a deep multidisciplinary knowledge of the construction can limit the use of cumbersome numerical modelling and analysis, however reaching reliable and accurate results usable also in the current practice

Comparative Seismic Assessment of Ancient Masonry Churches

“…No intervention may be designed with this method. Recent applications and similar approaches to this method may be found, for instance, in Lourenço and Roque (2006); Lourenço et al (2013); Caprili et al (2017); Formisano et al ( , 2018; Marotta et al (2018); Sarhosis et al (2018); Valente and Milani (2018a).…”

Simplified Formulations for Estimating the Main Frequencies of Ancient Masonry Churches

“…Moreover, from a computational point of view, the fundamental period is very important in order to apply analytical methods having a different level of refinement for estimating the response of masonry structures/elements. A recent discussion and application of such methods, with a particular reference to ancient masonry structures, may be found for instance, among the others, in Lagomarsino and Resemini (2009); Lourenço et al (2013); Caprili et al (2017); Formisano and Marzo (2017);D'Amato et al (2018); Fuentes et al (2019). More in general, a discussion of the significance of in-situ tests on ancient masonry structures may be found in Krstevska et al (2010); Formisano et al (2018), and in Luchin et al (2018).…”

Knowledge-Based Approach for the Structural Assessment of Monumental Buildings: Application to Case Studies

“…As a result, they behave more similar to "structural aggregates, " composed by several "structural units" than to unique buildings. It is thus important to carefully study the building construction process, the presence or the lack of adequate connections among structural units and vertical and horizontal elements, the cracking scenario to identify homogeneous portions for age of construction, the defined and ongoing relative displacements of elements and components, the structural system, materials, the floor and roof typology, the geometry, and so on (Binda et al, 1999b;Formisano et al, 2010;Cattari et al, 2014;Caprili et al, 2017;Baggio et al, 2018;Castellazzi et al, 2018). Structural elementary units can be, preliminarily, analyzed as isolated buildings, further considering their interaction and mutual interrelationship accounting possible restraints conditions, basing on the structural solution adopted and in situ investigated (Oliveira, 2003;Berto et al, 2017;Degli Abbati et al, 2019) The identification of the structural units highlights the constructive discontinuities that can represent weak areas of the structural aggregate to be in deep analyzed.…”

“…The adoption of linear and nonlinear analyses is appealing since it allows to freely model each typology of geometry (for example, in the case of vaulted surfaces) and constitutive laws; beside, difficulties lie in the high computational effort, in the time required for modeling, and in the reliability of the model itself: geometry, construction materials, boundary conditions, damages, and previous repairs strongly affect the results (Roca and Elyamani, 2018), these parameters being difficult to determine. Those models need then to be "combined" with accurate geometrical survey, even by means of a laser scanner, and deep investigations on structural details, material mechanical properties, and morphological evolution of the building (Caprili et al, 2017;Formisano et al, 2017).…”