Issue 45

F. Brandão et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 45 (2018) 14-32; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.45.02 14 Seismic behavior assessment of a Brazilian heritage construction Francisco Brandão, Aldecira Diógenes GEM/UVA, Department of Civil Engineering, State University of Vale do Acaraú, Brazil eng.fsbrandao@gmail.com , http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7888-6321 aldeciragd@yahoo.com.br , https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1411-8718 João Fernandes CENTRE/FAS , Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty Ari de Sá, Brazil j.fernandes.ec@outlook.com , http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4051-890X Esequiel Mesquita Nucle of Industrial Technology of Ceará and Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty Ari de Sá, Brazil mesquite.e@outlook.com , http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9905-6220 Michele Betti DICEA, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Florence, Italy mbetti@dicea.unifi.it , http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8389-3355 A BSTRACT . Preservation of historical constructions, and passing it on to fu- ture generations, is a major issue in modern societies. Earthquakes are one of the major causes of damages to heritage buildings across the world. The city of Sobral (Ceará State, Brazil) keeps in its historic center a large number of heritage buildings and, since 2008, an intense seismic activity has been observed. This study aims to contribute to the preservation of the Sobral her- itage constructions against seismic loads through the assessment of the seis- mic behavior of one representative building: the Nossa Senhora das Dores Church, a 19 th century historical construction. First, a 3D finite element (FE) model was built and tuned according to the results of dynamic tests per- formed under environmental loads. Next, the FE model was employed to as- sess the seismic behavior of the church by performing linear time-history analyses employing two real earthquakes. The results showed big displace- ments and high stresses in many parts of the church, allowing to identify the most critical and most susceptible to damage areas (based on the seismic sce- narios considered). These results can be considered as a support for seismic retrofitting measures to be adopted on Sobral heritage constructions. K EYWORDS . Seismic behavior; Heritage construction; Nossa Senhora das Dores Chuch; Numerical simulation; Sobral. Citation: Brandão, F., Diógenes, A., Fer- nandes, J., Mesquita, E., Betti, M., Seismic behavior assessment of a Brazilian heritage construction, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 45 (2018) 14-32. Received: 05.04.2018 Accepted: 03.06.2018 Published: 01.07.2018 Copyright: © 2018 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.