Highlighting the Impact of the Construction History of a Cultural Heritage Building Through a Vibration-Based Finite Element Model Updated by Particle Swarm Algorithm

ABSTRACT

Numerical models play a primary role in Cultural Heritage preservation. Nevertheless, the design of a realistic model remains challenging due not only to the complex behavior of masonry but also to the asynchronous building phases, the damage induced by natural and anthropic aggression, and the associated repairs. This paper discusses the impact of the information provided by an in-depth analysis of the construction history on the updating process of a Finite Element building model. The case study is the church of Sant’Agata del Mugello (Italy); for this building, a previous historical–archaeological study identified and recorded the asynchronous construction phases, the repair techniques, and the damage induced by three historical earthquakes (1542, 1611, and 1919) – moreover, a dense ambient vibration survey allowed to identify the modal parameters. The information from previous works is summarized in five Finite Element models with increasing complexity. A vibration-based model updating methodology based on a Particle Swarm Algorithm is developed. This work shows that the best minimization of the difference between the numerical and experimental modal parameters is obtained with the numerical model considering the identified construction techniques, repair phases, and connection relations between the bell tower and the nave.

KEYWORDS:

• building techniques
• construction history
• Cultural Heritage
• masonry church
• objective function
• Operational Modal Analysis
• Particle Swarm Optimization
• Sant’agata del Mugello
• vibration-based model updating

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Dr. Flomin Tchawe Nziaha for debugging multiprocessing in the PSO code and Dr. Cédric Giry for discussing the results. We also thank Dr. Hélène Dessales and Julien Clément for their advice during the development of this research work and comments on an early version of the manuscript. We thank Dr. Andrea Arrighetti for the discussions about the results. The authors kindly thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments help increase the manuscript’s quality. The authors warmly thank the community of Sant’Agata del Mugello for their moral and logistic support, particularly the major Federico Ignesti, Don Gianluca Mozzi, Marco Casati, Filippo Bellandi, Paolo Gucci, and Anna Bambi. This work was funded by Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, and the program TelluS-ALEAS of INSU-CNRS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Mmw: Macroseismic Moment Magnitude.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the INSU-Tellus (2018-2019) [2018-2019].