Abstract of the seminar
Cultural heritage structures are characterized by complex geometries. Also, they are generally made of masonry, i.e., an assemblage of quasi-brittle blocks bonded with mortar, which shows a highly nonlinear and anisotropic mechanical response. For these challenges, the structural assessment of historical structures is generally undertaken through advanced numerical modelling strategies. Numerical models can indeed support the process of knowledge of the structural behavior of monuments.
In this seminar, some latest advances in numerical modelling strategies for masonry and cultural heritage structures will be presented and discussed. Firstly, the main features of masonry mechanics will be summarized, together with the discussion of detailed and simplified numerical models recently developed for masonry. Then, point cloud-to-numerical model procedures will be introduced as appealing tools for mesh generation of complex solid geometries. Hence, a number of structural analysis approaches will be presented together with several applications on full-scale cultural heritage structures. Finally, the current activities of the EU-funded HOLAHERIS project will be shown. The seminar is open to researchers and graduate students (especially to “Computational Mechanics” and “Mechanics of Historical Masonry Structures” students).
Short Bio
Antonio Maria D’Altri (https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/am.daltri/en) is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Assistant Professor of Structural Mechanics at the University of Bologna. His research activity mainly focuses on developing numerical strategies for the structural analysis of masonry walls and full-scale historical monuments. In 2019, he obtained his PhD at the University of Bologna with the thesis "Advances in computational analysis of masonry structures". In 2021, he has been awarded an EU-funded 3-year Global fellowship Marie Skłodowska-Curie (269k€ from Horizon 2020) for the HOLAHERIS project "A holistic structural analysis method for cultural heritage structures conservation" (https://site.unibo.it/holaheris/en). Within this project, Dr D’Altri visited Prof. Glisic’s Heritage Structures Lab at Princeton University (USA) for 18 months in 2022-2023, and the Historical and Masonry Structures (HMS) group (Prof. Lourenço) at the University of Minho (Portugal) for 6 months in 2023.