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S.M.ART. BUIL.T 2014 - The project is coming to its (successful) end

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We now in June 2014 and the Structural Monitoring of ARTistic and historical BUILding Testimonies project (or SMART BUILT in short) is now coming to its end.

As it is probably known, during the last years, the European Community has developed a strong awareness of the role played by historical buildings, not only as objects to preserve, but more importantly as discrete national and regional cultural resources. These buildings represent a key element of the history and the identity of local communities, and of course they additionally contribute to local development both in terms of touristic and economic growth.

Under this perspective, the impact of the studies on structural monitoring and seismic risk prevention is not limited solely to the improvement of building preservation and protection but also to the local economic growth.

Italy and Greece has both a cultural heritage placed in the oldest hearth of their cities. Most of the historic city centers have a high grade of vulnerability to dynamic loads, such as earthquakes, which may induce an unpredictable collapse of a portion of the building or drive the whole structure to a rapid failure.

The two towns considered in the SMART BUILT project - Corfu and Trani - are located in areas with a medium level of seismic hazard and are indeed characterized by a high population density. From this point of view, the two historical centres are characterized by the presence of many ancient and brittle masonry buildings, with a widespread use of local stone.

The SMART BUILT project aimed at providing to technical officials of the municipalities of Trani and Corfu and the “Regional Direction for the Cultural and Landscape Heritage of Puglia” some indispensable training tools for the development and/or validation of structural restoration projects and seismic rehabilitation of historical buildings.

The particular role of the Informatics Department of Ionian University was to design and deploy a wireless sensor network to be used for evaluating ambient-induced vibrations of the historical buildings under consideration.

As you probably know, traditional wired monitoring technologies are rather difficult to be deployed in historical buildings, either due to high costs imposed by installing and maintaining the necessary wired infrastructure, or even due to several applied prohibitive legislations.

Modern trends on sensor networks nowadays allow the installation of wireless monitoring equipment, able to collect a large volume and variety of data that can be further processed in order to support prevention modelling techniques and strategies.

An innovative network architecture was introduced and applied that efficiently combines the benefits of both the wired and wireless systems. Furthermore, an efficient, state-of the-art algorithm developed by our research team successfully over came the problemof synchronization that this novel architecture inherently imposes.

We also achieved to describe the key factors for vulnerability modeling of historical buildings caused by dynamic loads and we managed to underline the generic principles that should be met by building vulnerability assessment methods. Towards this aim, a hybrid model for measuring building vulnerability caused by strong motion arrays was proposed. This model is based on a multi-disciplinary method that is able to accurately predict the behavior of a building structure in reaction to unforeseen stress method.

All the above innovative research work and results are included in a number of works/papers that were included in the project International onference proceedings. This conference was successfully organized about 3 months ago in Bari.

Finally, I invite you to fully immerse in the experience in the hope that this final SMARTBUILT newsletter issue will be the starting point for future collaborations and scientific events in the area of historic building monitoring and vulnerability assessment and modeling.

Prof. Vassilios Chrissikopoulos
Dept. of Informatics, Ionian University
Scientist in charge / Scientific responsible for Ionian University



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