Topics in monitoring of cultural heritage structures

Structural Health Monitoring, intended as the sum of strategies to assess the current health condition of a building and its future performance, takes on specific characteristics in the case of cultural heritage assets. Among these, the limited space for standardisation, the restricting requirements in terms of testing and intervention invasiveness, and the relevant uncertainties playing a role in understanding and modelling structural behaviour. This suggests the need for a broad approach to monitoring, based on an iterative process of observation, insight, modelling, interpretation of mechanisms and pathologies, and acquisition of selected monitoring data from different sources. This thesis comprises a few small contributions to distinct aspects of this process, with the general goal of providing results which could help the identification of optimal data sources and modelling tools for monumental masonry structures. The applications it collects intersect topics that range from the choice of material constitutive laws, to the use of protocols based on uncertainty quantification and Bayesian updating in order to study soil-structure interaction and dynamic identification, to the integration of on site and satellite sensing, mapping of pollution-related risk for heritage building materials and, finally, to the development of platforms that allow data exploration by general users.