Seismic Assessment of the Palace of Priors in Perugia

EasyChair Preprint 347

Abstract

The structural analysis of monumental buildings requires considering safety and conservation objectives, including also the possible presence of artistic assets. In order to face these issues, the paper presents the results of a seismic evaluation procedure carried out by the authors on an illustrative case of study, the Palace of Priors in Perugia, that besides to be one of the most renowned civic structures built by Italian communes of Central Italy during the High Middle Ages to house their city governments, it is also characterized by the presence of a lot of cultural heritage assets. Within this context, the macroscale structural behavior and the dynamic properties of the building were evaluated through a nonlinear static analysis (pushover) and a more simple approach directly based on the limit analysis theorems. In both cases, the comparison between the capacity of the construction to withstand lateral loads together with the expected demands resulting from seismic actions confirmed the susceptibility of these types of buildings to extensive damage and collapse, as frequently observed in similar buildings. Furthermore, the results of a Finite Element modeling technique performed on a detailed 3D model of the medieval portal of the building were used in order to investigate the causes of the crack pattern on this important artistic asset.

Keyphrases: Historical buildings, Masonry modelling, Non linear static analysis, kinematic analysis

@booklet{EasyChair:347,
  author    = {Giulio Castori and Romina Sisti and Antonio Borri and Marco Corradi and Alessandro De Maria},
  title     = {Seismic Assessment of the Palace of Priors in Perugia},
  doi       = {10.29007/vdxr},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 347},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2018}}