Publication Date:
2013-03-22
Description:
A Roman mausoleum located in the ancient city of Pinara, southwest Turkey, shows traces of strong dynamic forces. Considering the seismotectonic potential of the area, earthquake ground motions are a potential cause of damage. On the other hand, the mausoleum is located at the foot of an almost 100-m-high steep cliff imposing rockfall hazard to the building. We constructed a 3D model of the mausoleum based on 90 million points from nine laser scans. From this model the shape and size of the construction was measured and the displacements of all visible block vertices have been derived. Based on the 3D model and examples of similar structures a fully reconstructed virtual discrete-element model of the mausoleum with 180 individual blocks was constructed. This model was exposed to earthquake ground motions and the impact of falling rocks. The impact velocity of the latter was estimated with a site-specific rockfall model. The earthquake ground motion was estimated from local earthquake scenarios and quantified with 3D synthetic strong-motion seismograms. In addition, analytic ground-motion signals were used to study the general dynamic behavior of the mausoleum and the vulnerability of its columns. Comparison of the in situ measured block displacements and the damage pattern with the results of the rockfall and earthquake models clearly favor coseismic displacement as the cause of the damage. A local earthquake with moment magnitude 6.3 is sufficient to produce the observed damage.
Print ISSN:
0037-1106
Electronic ISSN:
1943-3573
Topics:
Geosciences
,
Physics
