Environmental and Ambient Vibration Monitoring of Historical Adobe Buildings: Applications in Emblematic Andean Churches

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the application of long-term environmental and structural remote monitoring in two emblematic 16th-century adobe churches located in southern Peru. The paper starts by presenting details of the planning and installation processes of the monitoring systems and continues with a detailed discussion of the results of almost two years of continuous monitoring. As expected, due to the large thermal inertia of the adobe systems and size of the buildings, the results of the environmental monitoring indicated a non-uniform distribution of temperature and relative humidity inside the buildings, and an important attenuation of the internal conditions in comparison with the external ones. On the other hand, the structural monitoring results evidenced an annual cyclical behavior of the natural frequencies with an apparent correspondence with the changes in environmental conditions due to seasonal influences. The correlation of ambient conditions and structural parameters confirmed the high affinity between relative humidity measurements and natural frequencies when hourly fluctuations were removed from the measurements. An important novelty is the affinity of structural dynamic properties and a single environmental variable, the absolute humidity, was also evidenced since high determination coefficients were obtained when it was compared with the identified natural frequencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Adobe buildings
• Andean churches
• correlation analysis
• environmental monitoring
• structural monitoring

Acknowledgments

The present work was carried out by the Engineering and Heritage research group of PUCP in collaboration with the Civil Engineering departments of the University of Chile and the University of Minho. The work was developed thanks to the funding provided by the program Cienciactiva-CONCYTEC in the framework of the Contract N ° 222-2015-FONDECYT and the funding received from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) through its funding office DGI-PUCP (project 349-2016). The first author also acknowledges ELARCH program for the scholarship in support of his PhD studies (Project Reference number: 552129-EM-1-2014-1-IT-ERA MUNDUS-EMA21).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CONCYTEC [N ° 222-2015-FONDECYT];Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú [DGI 349-2016]; ELARCH program [552129-EM-1-2014-1-IT-ERA MUNDUS-EMA21].