Damage assessment of cultural heritage affected by last Italian earthquakes

In the present work, the importance of considering the exact nonlinear and three-dimensional behavior of masonry structures is shown to study the damage assessment of complex structures. For this purpose, three churches damaged by the last earthquake are taken as cases study. The exact geometries of the structures are reconstructed, while information regarding the mechanical properties of materials is derived from previous investigations and literature references. Based on this information, the Finite Elements numerical models are realized. The models are used to performing static and dynamic analysis. The eigenvalue analyses are turn out to be good to identify, with low computational time, the elements more prone to be damaged, meanwhile the non-linear static analyses allowed to follow the damage evolution beyond the elastic field and to extract the seismic capacity.