Seismic risk assessment for architectural heritages in historic areas using field and centrifuge tests

Abstract

Architectural heritages are exposed to natural and man-made disasters so that the need for systematic safety management and research to prevent disasters and to preserve the structures has arisen. Gyeongju and Buyeo are the most important historic areas in Korea, boasting a wealth of historic sites and a legacy of cultural heritage dating back more than a thousand years. Thus the necessity of estimating the seismic risk of historic areas has been recognized. The geotechnical information including shear wave velocity profiles for architectural heritage sites is determined by field site investigation and then the site-specific ground response analyses and GIS based microzonation are performed based on this information. Many Korean stone cultural heritages have masonry structures that are seemingly vulnerable to horizontal dynamic load such as earthquakes. However, the stone heritages with masonry structure have kept their forms for over a thousand years despite numerous historic records of earthquakes. Understanding the needs of the architectural heritages, this study proposes dynamic centrifuge modeling test as a way of seismic risk assessment in order to find out how stone architectural heritages with masonry structure endured the seismic load, and whether there is any possibility of future earthquake damage. The stress condition and the scaling law of the miniatures within a centrifuge are examined and the modeling of models for the stone block is performed. As the results, it turns out that similar behavior appears when the results of the dynamic centrifuge tests for three miniatures are reverted to the prototype scale. Therefore, it is verified that the characteristics of seismic behavior as well as the seismic risk of actual stone architectural heritage can be assessed through dynamic centrifuge test. The dynamic centrifuge tests for one fifteenth scale models of the three storied stone pagoda at Bulguksa Temple and the five storied stone pagoda of Jeong...