COMPARISON REGARDING SEISMIC VULNERABILITY OF HISTORICAL ORTHODOX CHURCHES IN ROMANIA

The main purpose of this paper is to realize an analysis of the seismic vulnerability of masonry orthodox churches located in the Moldavia region. Old masonry structures were considered and a comparison between two main types of churches was realized - churches on trefoil plan and churches in Greek cross plan configuration. Structural vulnerability for the considered typologies was assessed based on nonlinear static analysis (pushover). Vulnerability and fragility curves were plotted based on the results and on the well-known methodology for the analyzed structures. Due to their particularities, these churches may cause problems regarding human evacuation in case of an earthquake action, resulted or not with partial collapse of the structure. For this reason the paper discusses the possibility of reducing the risk of casualties caused by the vulnerability in case of a mass gathering of people. In this respect, numerical simulations were performed for the evacuation time required in relation to a certain level of structural response to a seismic action, for the two types of the considered structures.