Seismic Safety Assessment of Mixed Timber-Masonry Historical Building: An Example in Lima, Peru

ABSTRACT

Hotel El Comercio is a typical colonial era house in Peru. This category of buildings exhibits specific architectural details and construction techniques, including adobe walls and mixed timber-earth systems (quincha). This paper presents the seismic assessment of the building in its current condition, proposing adequate strategies for modeling this type of buildings through finite element models, which remains a true challenge in case of seismic loading. Different sets of nonlinear properties are adopted and sensitivity analyses, involving different mechanical characteristics and load conditions, are performed in order to understand how they affect the structural response.

KEYWORDS:

• Seismic Assessment
• adobe masonry
• quincha
• testing
• finite element analysis
• safety analysis
• sensitivity analysis

Highlights

• Finite element model of a traditional Latin America building in adobe and mixed timber-earth systems.

• Definition of a best representation of the traditional materials through a set of nonlinear properties.

• Safety of the building quantified by a set of advanced nonlinear analyses.

• Demonstration that the traditional techniques in Latin America are likely to exhibit adequate safety levels in moderate seismic hazard zones.

Acknowledgements

This work was carried out with funding from the Getty Seismic Retrofitting Project under the auspices of the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI). This work is also partially financed by FEDER funds through the Competitivity Factors Operational Programme–COMPETE and by national funds through FCT–Foundation for Science and Technology.