Vulnerability assessment of masonry churches through an automated fast limit analysis approach

Almost all italian churches are highly vulnerable historical masonry structures located in seismic regions. During recent seismic events, many churches have been damaged and successively considered unsafe. A great part of the damaged churches is still waiting for seismic rehabilitation and the application of strengthening measures against seismic actions. Italian Guidelines for the Cultural Heritage help practitioners in the safety assessment of historical constructions suggesting a conventional approach based on pre-assigned partial failure mechanisms and the utilization of the kinematic theorem of limit analysis in order to evaluate the acceleration at collapse. The aim of the present study is to propose an automated procedure for the vulnerability assessment of masonry churches based on a homogenized kinematic limit analysis of masonry structures, starting from their three-dimensional representation obtained within a commercial free-form modeler.