Structural Health Monitoring of a Historical Church in Italy

Guaranteeing adequate structural reliability levels of existing historic buildings is a matter of fundamental importance in structural engineering. Assessment of the health conditions can be carried out through several non-destructive or semi-destructive investigations techniques. However, health conditions in historic structures are continuously evolving and structural assessment permits their evaluation only with regard to a certain point of their service life. For this reason continuous structural health monitoring (SHM) has been gaining more and more popularity in last years. The present work illustrates the experimental activities carried out in a historical church in the south of Italy. First, structural assessment was carried out through a set of complementary SDTs and NDTs as: flat jacket tests, pulse velocity tests, endoscopies and dynamic identification with the aim to identify the main material properties and determine the modal parameters of the main masonry structure. Finally, based on these results, a program for the continuous SHM, including permanent accelerometers, strain gauges, and environmental sensors, is presented.