Experimental seismic assessment and protection of museum artefacts

Earthquakes are a major threat to monuments and to museums and their valuable contents worldwide. The protection of cultural heritage structures and also of museums and their treasures against earthquakes is hence a top priority. The paper will present large scale shaking table tests on cultural heritage assets and will emphasize on the use computing models in tandem with experimental testing. More specifically, the paper will present an extensive experimental campaign on the seismic response of artefacts, with emphasis on statues and busts. The tests have been carried out in the framework of SEREME project (Seismic Resilience of Museum Contents) at the AZALEE seismic simulator of CEA in Saclay, Paris under the auspices of the EC funded SERA project. The aim is to understand the seismic response of statues and busts and then develop novel and cost-effective risk mitigation schemes for improving the seismic resilience of museum valuable contents. The study is focused on the investigation of the seismic response of two real-scale marble roman statues and three busts of three roman emperors standing on pedestals of different types and size. Both non-isolated and seismically isolated artefacts are considered, while two new and highly efficient base isolation systems, tailored to art objects, have been tested. The first isolator is a pendulum-based system, while the second utilizes Shape Memory Alloy wires. Specifically tailored, numerical models of varying complexity, for single and two-block rocking systems, were developed for the needs of this study and are also assessed against the experimental results