Settlement analysis of the masonry umbrella vault of the Masegra Castle

In this work, the first results on the settlement analysis of the masonry umbrella vault located in the Masegra Castle (Sondrio, Italy) are presented. An umbrella vault is a particular type of cross vault in which the high number of sails is disposed according to an umbrella-shaped configuration. For geometry reasons, these vaults presents typically a good load-bearing capacity when subjected to vertical and horizontal loads. Therefore, the most critical issue is given by settlements of the supporting walls. A geometrical model based on NURBS surfaces has been derived starting from a detailed point cloud. A recently published method based on an adaptive kinematic limit analysis is adopted to find the cracks configuration deriving from a given base settlement.