Comparative seismic vulnerability analysis on ten masonry towers in the coastal Po Valley in Italy

Seismic Risk Assessment of Historic Masonry Towers: Comparison of Four Case Studies

“…These structures, built to withstand only vertical loads, show unique typological and morphological features, which have severe effects on their behavior under horizontal loads: due to the high slenderness and mass their seismic risk assessment is a significant concern. As also demonstrated by recent Italian earthquakes and discussed by other authors (Casolo et al 2013;Valente and Milani 2016), the slenderness and base shear area are among the most important parameters ruling the structural response of towers under seismic loading. In the case of isolated masonry towers, damages are usually most severe at the base (as a result of a combination of bending and shear loads) although cracks along the whole height of the building have been observed.…”

“…The nonlinear analysis approaches differ according to (1) the type of employed method of analysis: nonlinear static (pushover) and/or time-history (Casolo 1998;Bernardeschi et al 2004;Girardi et al 2010;Peña et al 2010;Milani et al 2012;D'Ambrisi et al 2012;Casolo et al 2013;Salvatori et al 2015). The pushover methods comprise both standard (Milani et al 2012;Casolo et al 2013) and multimodal approaches.…”

Seismic Vulnerability of Different in Geometry Historic Masonry Towers

“…According to the previous remarks, it is pretty clear that the most accurate approach to deal with the analysis of masonry towers under horizontal loads should require specific ad hoc FE devices [5]- [19] in order to deal with the complexity of the problem through a suitable level of accuracy.…”

Limit Analysis Approach for the Seismic Vulnerability Reduction of Masonry Towers Through Strengthening With Traditional and Innovative Materials

“…Figure 1 illustrates four possible collapse mechanisms of masonry towers due to lateral loads: vertical shear crack (#1), rocking failure (#2), rocking failure with limited tensile strength (#3) and horizontal sliding (#4), [5], [11], [19], [20]. These mechanisms represent simple cases where the stiffness of the tower as a block is relatively high compared to small deformations.…”

“…Different levels of analysis, such as FE (finite element) analyses [4]- [9], rigid elements [10], Limit Analysis (LA) [11] and simplified models [7], [12], are available in the literature. As regards the towers performance upgrading, very few cases that could be found consist of horizontal and vertical tied rods, which are used to increase the global structural capacity under horizontal loads, [13], [14].…”