Digital Modelling and Numerical Simulation as an open support for Notre-Dame de Paris Conservation

Conservation of Heritage buildings is a wide field that ranges from the restauration of deteriorated, or damaged, structures to the restitution options offered by modern digital technologies. The conservation, then, can be view as an operative plan expressed in terms of both maintenance of objects/structures which are subject to time deterioration and exposed to several risks (environmental or anthropic) and digital recording of data which could be useful for the future understanding of this ‘Heritage’. In this context, the recent dramatic event involving the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris has risen a question of how to protect architectural masterpieces from destructions and damages. This paper reports an overview of the digital techniques used to preserve the ‘information’ on this masterpieces; more specifically, a structural modelling technique (finite element modelling) is applied on the Notre-Dame cathedral, transforming the architectural BIM (Building Information Model) virtual ‘maquette’ of the Church into a reliable open source numerical model capable of giving support in evaluating its structural integrity.