Design of the Seismic Upgrading of the Tambour of the S. Nicolò’s Church in Catania with the DIS-CAM System

The high seismic vulnerability of several monumental masonry buildings can be ascribed to the low strength of the materials employed, to the presence of wide openings and slender panels and to the high stress due to both vertical and horizontal seismic forces. A new upgrading system, named DIS-CAM (DISsipative Active Confinement of Masonry) was proposed to design the seismic upgrading of the tambour of the dome of the S. Nicolò’s church in Catania (Italy). The technique, that can be considered reversible and a not invasive, is based on a rocking-damper system, in which the rocking and the re-centring capacity are provided by the behaviour of masonry panels, while the dissipation capacity is mainly relied upon hysteretic elements stressed in flexure beyond their elastic limit. In this paper, the design of the scaled model’s seismic upgrading is presented and the main outcomes of preliminary numerical analyses carried out on the tambour, without any reinforcement and retrofitted with the DIS-CAM system, are discussed.