Assessment of Seismic Behaviour and Safety of a Masonry Heritage


Creative Commons License

TURK A. M.

ICONARP International Journal Of Architecture And Planning, cilt.7, sa.2, ss.592-607, 2019 (ESCI) identifier identifier

Özet

Turkey is a highly seismic country where numerous major earthquakeshave devastated or damaged the existing historic structures owing tothere is a large number of historical structures, mostly religious ones likemosques, and churches. The minarets are essential parts of mosques andthere are many of these historic structures across the country whichwere built since Seljuq Empire started to rule the Anatolia and followedby Ottomans. As Turkey located in a highly active seismic zone, thepossible damage of the minarets, the tallest part of the mosques, shouldbe examined and the safety measures, in terms of seismic retrofit, shouldbe considered. It is engineering communities’ responsibility to satisfythe longevity of these existing heritages by the help of science andknowledge.To realize this objective, a case study is planned which addresses theproblem of seismic capacity of a stone masonry minaret as a part of thearchitectural heritage in Istanbul, and a typical historical mosque ischosen. Mathematical model of the minaret is prepared in order toobtain possible deformation profile, lateral displacements, free vibrationmodes and most likely failure modes under seismic excitation by usingresponse spectrum analysis. Most recent developments in the in-situ testing of structures andcomputational procedures for structural analysis have made reaching tothe important results about the behaviour of the old masonry structures.The numerical results have shown that the greatest damage accumulatednear the shoe region and the lower part of the shaft. The evaluation ofthese results is promising in terms of seismic safety of these heritageswith minimized intervention on the structure without compromising theauthentic view and function.