Seismic assessment of historical masonry structures: The case of Amasya Tashan

Abstract

Turkey owns a very important cultural and historical heritage that bears the traces of thousands of years of culture and civilization. It is an inevitable duty to carry these treasuries to the future generations. In this paper, structural safety assessment and strengthening stages of one of these important historical heritages namely Amasya Tashan was investigated in details as a case study. For this purpose, the detailed architectural projects of the structure with the information of all load carrying and structural elements were prepared. Then, the structural dynamic analyses were performed by using SAP2000. The internal forces obtained from the dynamic analyses determined the weak regions. By obtaining the information from dynamic analyses, the method of state of the art technique of application of the structure that needs structural strengthening was selected. The last step is the application of these precautions to the whole structure. At the end of this study, this study not also contains several strengthening techniques that is used in one masonry structure together but also provides a useful reference to the practicing engineers.