Effect of soil properties on the seismic damage assessment of historical masonry minaret–soil interaction systems

Abstract

The interaction between soil and structure plays a crucial role on accurate determination of structures' seismic behavior. The assumption of fixed base structure has been commonly used in traditional design works, and the interaction between soil and structure is thus often neglected. In addition, historical masonry structures particularly built on elastic soil media may be significantly affected seismic behavior of the structure under earthquakes. In this research, the damage distribution on a historical masonry minaret is numerically investigated under horizontal earthquake ground motion. AlacaMosque minaret was built in 1271 in Bolvadin district of Afyon province. The historical masonry minaret was chosen as the subject of the study. Nonlinear seismic time history analyses were conducted for fixed-based and different soil properties under horizontal earthquake ground motion. The horizontal (East-West) component acceleration records of Dinar earthquake (Mw = 6.1) that took place on October 10, 1995, were used during the analyses. Maximum displacement, maximum/minimum principal stresses, and damage ratios were determined by nonlinear analyses performed considering fixed base and soil-structure interaction. The analysis results showed that soil-structure interaction had significant effect on the structural behavior of the minaret, such that, the minaret that was expected to get damage in the case of fixed base did not get any damage when soil-structure interaction was considered. KEYWORDS damage plasticity, earthquake ground motion, masonry minarets, nonlinear seismic behavior, soilstructure interaction

Seismic damage assessment of a historical masonry minaret considering soil-structure interaction

“…Although this assumption gives reasonable results for hard soils, it may cause some errors, especially in soft and loose soils. Some studies have been performed on SSI and SFSI in recent years [20][21][22]. SSI is generally performed with 3 different methods.…”

“…The acceleration component with a maximum value of 373.7 cm/s 2 is applied in the minaret's horizontal (x) direction. Many researchers have used the effective portion of acceleration records instead of a full record [20,33,[43][44][45][46][47]. The effective portion, which is between 7-19 seconds, has been obtained by using Housner and Arias intensity methods with DEEPSOIL software [48] as shown in Fig.…”

“…Although this assumption is acceptable for hard soils, it may lead to wrong results for soft and loose soils [19]. In recent years, some studies have been carried out in fields such as Soil-Structure-Interaction (SSI) [20] and Structure-Foundation-Soil Interaction (SFSI) [21,22]. Camata et al [23] determined that the boundary conditions and properties of the soil on the structural behavior of a tower built in Italy had great importance on the seismic behavior of the structure.…”

“…Silva et al [26] investigated the effect of SFSI on Carmine tower's seismic performance, which is the tallest tower of Naples and determined that the SFSI should be considered in regions with insufficient lateral rigidity. Hökelekli and Al-Helwani [20] stated that SSI significantly affected the damage distribution and rate of masonry structures. Ismail et al [27] determined that the soil medium was effective on RC structures' behavior.…”

System Identification of Mosques Resting on Soft Soil. The Case of the Suleiman Mosque in the Medieval City of Rhodes, Greece

“…The seismic vulnerability of slender minarets and towers may be heavily influenced by the interaction with the foundation soil subjected to strong ground motions. Casolo et al [28] conducted comparative seismic vulnerability analysis on ten masonry towers to identify the factors that play a crucial role in their seismic vulnerability, while Hökelekli and Al-Helwani [40] investigated the effects of SSIs with infinite elements on the seismic damage behavior of stone masonry minarets with different soil types, considering the linear behavior of the soil domain. Several other studies also deal with the influence of soil-structure interactions on the fragility of buildings either on shallow or deep foundations [41][42][43][44].…”