ABSTRACT
Masonry buildings of the architectural heritage were often built with poor materials and according to irregular structural schemes. A new technique for seismic strengthening is presented in the paper, with reference to a real application. The application will be presented with reference to a historical masonry building used as public theatre, in which four pre-tensioned Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) wires were designed and applied as external strengthening ties. The use of FRP pre-tensioned wires, 40 meters long, shows itself to be an effective structural solution in terms of costs and speed of application in order to reduce the seismic vulnerability. In terms of maximum local stresses the building did not show deficiencies, due to the low acceleration values that are considered by applying the seismic code. Most of the collapse mechanisms under seismic actions derive from local out-of-plane behavior. The properties of the Carbon FRP wire-strengthening system were tested in laboratory, finding results according to the nominal properties.
