RESEARCH ARTICLE


Maniace Castle in Syracuse, Italy: Comparison Between Present Structural Situation and Hypothetical Original Configuration by Means of Full 3D FE Models



Siro Casolo, Gabriele Milani*, Carlo Alberto Sanjust, Alberto Taliercio
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Strutturale (DIS), Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133 Milan, Italy


Article Metrics

CrossRef Citations:
3
Total Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 293
Abstract HTML Views: 222
PDF Downloads: 161
Total Views/Downloads: 676
Unique Statistics:

Full-Text HTML Views: 208
Abstract HTML Views: 166
PDF Downloads: 150
Total Views/Downloads: 524



Creative Commons License
© 2012 Casolo et al;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Structural En-gineering, Technical University of Milan, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32 20133 Milan Itali; Tel: +39 349 5516064; Fax: +39 (0)532 807130; E-mails: milani@stru.polimi.it , gabriele.milani@polimi.it


Abstract

The Maniace Castle in Syracuse, Italy, built under Emperor Frederick II in the first half of the 13th century, is analyzed from a structural point of view by means of a detailed 3D Finite Element model. The castle was struck by many catastrophic events during the centuries, which heavily damaged the structure and caused subsequent changes in the origi-nal implant.

After a concise description of the main architectural characteristics of the building and its actual state of degradation, two full 3D FE numerical analyses are discussed, representing respectively the present geometric configuration and that ob-tained after a hypothetical intervention aimed at reporting the structure into its original conceived shape. Conventional static analyses in the linear range are performed on such large scale meshes, under gravity loads and horizontal loads con-ventionally representing seismic excitation, respectively investigating the role played by self-weight into the degradation of some structural elements (particularly central columns of the hypostyle hall) and the effect induced by horizontal forces on both the global behavior and the local widespread local regions with positive stresses. On the basis of such numerical results, some useful observations to be considered in a future plan of restoration aimed at reporting the castle in its origi-nal configuration are finally provided.

Keywords: Masonry, full 3D FE analyses, case study, seismic actions, gravity loads.