Ingeniería (Dr.)

Historical earthen buildings are vulnerable to external solicitations, as earthquakes, tsunamis, environmental conditions and others, and, often, they are under unacceptable risks. For all these aspects, earthen buildings need an indispensable intervention but also an accurate diagnosis to respect the modern restoration principles. Nowadays, the research field related to the structural analysis of existing earthen buildings is very far from a complete and exhaustive knowledge. For studying these types of buildings, experimental investigations are mandatory. The thesis has the ambitious goal to fill the lack of knowledge about the dynamic behavior of historical earthen buildings. The work started with the study of effects of temperature and humidity on the “earth material”. For this reason, single adobe walls were built and analyzed by a continuous monitoring of the internal and external environmental parameters and dynamic properties to understand their behavior as simple adobe construction systems. The main challenges in this stage were the development of a suitable algorithm to automatically identify the dynamic parameters, the study of the internal distribution of temperature and humidity, and, the analysis of the environmental effects on the long-term monitoring of simple adobe systems. The results showed a good heat storing capacity of the walls and the existence of an internal thermal flow connected to a combined effect of air temperature, wind, solar radiation, and wall orientation. Furthermore, environmental seasonal and daily effects were first identified and subsequently isolated from the structural response, demonstrating a clear inverse relationship between temperature and dynamic properties. After this first stage, the application of the achieved knowledge was applied to a real case study to verify the obtained results in a larger scale. The Church of San Pedro de Andahuaylillas was chosen as case study. This church was built in the sixteenth century and represents a suitable example of historical earthen building. This architecture is one of the most amazing and beautiful example of religious art, solemn testimony of the Andean culture. To this church, a long-term monitoring system was applied for a better understanding of the earthen building behavior. The results indicated that he environmental variable affect the structural behavior at two levels: a seasonal long-term influence was detected as well as a daily short- term one. Seasonal effects caused variations of up to 8% in natural frequencies, and shorter-term influences were also verified causing variations of up 3.8%. Daily results showed a delayed effect of the environmental conditions in the structural response. Finally, multiple linear regression models were developed using the absolute humidity as independent variable to successfully predict the long-term frequency variation of the analyzed case study for structural health assessment purpose.

Ingeniería (Dr.)

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