Modal characterization and NDTs of a historical church in Noto

Assessment of historical buildings is now a matter of fundamental importance in civil engineering and researchers have been long working to find the best investigation strategies and trying to limit their invasiveness as much as possible. Among other investigation techniques, modal characterization (or dynamic identification) has been gaining popularity due to its non-destructiveness for its ability to capture the behavior of the real structure. Combined with more traditional non-destructive-tests (NDTs) or semi-destructive-tests (SDTs), a complete view of the state of health of the structure can be obtained. The present work illustrates the experimental activities carried out on an historical church in Noto (Italy) with the aim to determine modal parameters of the main masonry structure, with an important focus on its façade. NDTs and SDTs were used to identify the main material properties, which were then implemented on a detailed Finite Element (FE) model. Finally, numerical results were compared with the experimental ones in order to ensure a good simulation of the real structural behavior.