Paper
Applied Earthquake Engineering in the Research of Vulnerable Masonry Structures
- Authors:
- Spyridon S. Kouris
- Abstract
- Strong earthquakes caused damages or collapses of vulnerable masonry structures. Over the last few decades, a great number of historical masonry bell towers which were erected in areas of relatively high seismic activity, have suffered from damages and cracking by earthquakes. In addition to these damages other causes, as thermal and hydroscopic strain and cyclic stress caused by wind action can act in combination with the long term phenomena and contribute to worsen the damages. Consequently, some of the most known bell towers have collapsed today or have been reconstructed. So, the medieval tower of Pavia (Italy) collapsed on March 17th, 1989, the bell tower of Cathedral of Monza (Italy) collapsed in May, 1993, the Cathedral of Noto (Sicily-Italy) collapsed in March 1999, the bell tower of St. Mark in Venice collapsed in 1902 and it was rebuilt later and many other cases. The few survived till today masonry “slender” bell towers are under considerable damages (such as the bell towers on Corfu island in Greece) and many of them are masterpieces of architecture in the past centuries. The aim of this paper is to describe the behavior of these bell towers under dynamic loading and to research how the geometry of these structures and the ground soil has affected their response to earthquakes. The finite element program SAP 2000 has been used for the study of the dynamic analysis of bell towers.
- Keywords
- Frequencies; Dynamic Analysis; Masonry Bell-tower
- StartPage
- 39
- EndPage
- 46
- Doi