Applications of Modern Technologies for the Seismic Assessment of Heritage Constructions in Peru

Abstract eng:
Heritage conservation in earthquake prone areas involves the development of integrated multidisciplinary studies to understand the present state of a historical building or archaeological site, predict its structural behavior under future seismic loading, and if needed, propose appropriate intervention procedures or retrofit measures. These type of studies are challenging and require the use of innovative technologies for reliable structural assessment since historical constructions may be already affected by seismic or other types of damage, their construction records and drawings are often not readily available, sometimes the structure has been built in stages over a wide time frame, they may have unknown or difficult to define boundary conditions, the materials are not easy to characterize and sometimes units or layers are not visible, and in general their seismic analysis and evaluation often requires sophisticated nonlinear models. This paper presents an overview of recent and ongoing studies that are being carried out by the Engineering & Heritage research group at PUCP. This multidisciplinary research group has been performing seismic assessment of multiple archaeological and historical sites in Peru using a wide variety of cutting-edge tools, such as 3D reconstruction using image collection and processing, NDT material characterization, and detailed structural analysis and seismic assessment. The paper will provide an overview of the application of these technologies to two emblematic case studies of Peruvian earthen heritage buildings: i) the archaeological complex of ‘Chokepukio’ in Cusco, and ii) the church ‘San Pedro Apostol de Andahuaylillas’ in the same city. The first case will present work carried out involving geometrical surveys with unmanned aerial vehicles and in-situ dynamic testing. In the second case, the same techniques are complemented with IR thermography. The results of these tests were integrated in both cases in numerical models that allowed predicting the seismic behavior of the studied monuments.

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