Assessing Seismic Behavior of a Masonry Historic Building considering Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction (Case Study of Arge-Tabriz)

ABSTRACT

Historic heritage buildings are a part of historic basis of each society and an economic resource. Therefore, preserving and maintenance of these buildings are cultural, economic and social demand. This research investigates the seismic performance of a historical building named Arg of Tabriz (Arge Alishah) that dates back to 14th century and is located at the city center of Tabriz (NW of Iran). Static, modal, and finally nonlinear dynamic (time history) analysis were performed by both “Considering Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI)” and “fixed base (ignoring SSI)” Cases.

It is found from the results that, SSI extremely affects mode shapes and their frequencies and depending on the frequency content of the records, can has an incremental or decremental effect on structural responses. As expected, the building of Arg could carry gravity loads easily and despite its stability against earthquake loading in fixed base case, showed a weakness (especially in eastern and western walls direction) and overturned when it was analyzed in SSI case because of yielding of the surrounding soil.

KEYWORDS:

• ABAQUS
• Arg of Tabriz (Arge Alishah)
• Finite Element Method (FEM)
• nonlinear dynamic analysis
• seismic behavior

Acknowledgments

The present work has benefited from the MSc thesis of the first author, under the supervision of the second author and consultant of third and fourth authors. The authors would like to present their gratitude to Cultural Heritage Organization (CHO) of East Azerbaijan (NW of Iran) for the data used in this work.

Disclosure

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.