Seismic Assessment of an Historical Masonry Building using Nonlinear Static Analysis

According to the existing technical codes and guidelines, various methods for the seismic assessment of historical buildings exist. They range from simplified models to equivalent frames, up to detailed finite element models. In the first part of this paper the advantages and drawbacks of the various approaches are briefly discussed. Some of them are simple but they rely on very strict assumptions and cannot be used in all the situations. Others are able to give very detailed results but are computationally intensive and time consuming. In this work, the attention is focused on an intermediate approach, the nonlinear static analysis of equivalent frames models. This method is able to give a measure of the response of the structure but at the same time it is simple to implement. In particular, its application with the code SAP2000 is presented. In the second part of the work, this approach is applied to a façade of an historical building that was damaged by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake (central Italy). The considered building is the Camponeschi Palace, located in L’Aquila city center. The damage mechanisms obtained are compared with the observed damage and with those obtained from other approaches and reported in the existing technical literature.