NUMERICAL DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF A MASONRY TRIUMPHAL ARCH: COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT STRENGTHENING CONFIGURATIONS

Although masonry arches and vaults are often repaired and strengthened with fiber composite materials, there is still a relatively small number of experimental and numerical studies aimed at investigating their dynamic response. This topic is of great interest, especially for some types of structures, such as the triumphal arches and slender barrel vaults found in many Italian churches, that have been proved to be highly vulnerable to seismic actions. Observations of the damages occurred during recent earthquakes have revealed that failure mechanisms were very often activated in triumphal arches, nearly always ending in significant damage, thus requiring repair interventions. With the aim of contributing to this end, numerical dynamic analyses of a masonry triumphal arch of a medium-sized church have been performed and reported in this paper. The reference structure is the masonry triumphal arch built in 2004 at the ELSA Laboratory, where a dynamic identification campaign was carried out to study its in-plane behavior. In this work, a finite-element model of the specimen has been realized for the numerical simulations. Then, an input ground motion has been applied to such structure, and various strengthening configurations hypothesized. From the results obtained, some design indications on the most effective solutions for the improvement of the structure seismic performance are suggested.