Abstract

In the last decades the need for an effective seismic protection and vulnerability reduction of strategic structures and particularly the architectural heritage determined a growing interest in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) as a measure of passive mitigation of earthquake effects. The object of monitoring is to identify, locate and classify type and severity of damages induced by external actions or degradation phenomena and to assess their effects on the structural performance. In this way it is possible to take appropriate measures to reduce the danger of collapse and, when necessary, perform strengthening interventions to improve the structural and seismic capacity. Motivated by the above reasons, this thesis aims at providing a contribution to the development of techniques and integrated methodologies, based on SHM, for the assessment and protection of Cultural Heritage (CH) buildings and monuments. Firstly, after a detailed state of the art review on specific topics related to SHM of civil engineering structures, a new methodology for the implementation of monitoring techniques on historic masonry structures is proposed. Selected case studies, equipped with distributed sensors and acquisition systems, allowed the definition and successive validation of SHM as a knowledge-based assessment tool, implemented to evaluate intervention needs, following an incremental approach during their execution, and to control the damage states of buildings in a post-seismic scenario. In order to maximize the benefits of SHM and optimize the entire process, dedicated software for static monitoring and automated algorithms for modal parameters identification have been developed, able to provide almost real time information on the health state of the monitored structure. Finally integrated procedures based on robust statistical and numerical models have been implemented to interpret and exploit SHM outputs to assess the structural conditions of the investigated CH buildings.