This work presents the application of timber-based retrofitting techniques to a case-study stone masonry church featuring a wooden roof from 18th century. From the static point of view, the original roof structure presented a number of undersized structural elements, and its members were poorly or not connected among each other and to the masonry, making the church vulnerable to seismic loads as well. Thus, the roof was retrofitted with wood-based techniques, including an overlay of plywood panels, against seismic actions. These affordable, rapid, easily realizable interventions enabled both the conservation and seismic retrofitting of the roof, providing an adequate load-carrying capacity for static loads, and an effective diaphragm action against seismic loads. The conducted numerical analyses showed that the realized interventions greatly improve the seismic behaviour of the building. Besides, when the additional energy dissipation provided by the plywood panels overlay is taken into account in the numerical model, the church would even potentially be able to fully withstand the expected seismic action of the site.@en

Wood-based retrofitting techniques for seismic upgrading and architectural conservation of existing buildings have found increasing application in the last decades. With reference to the in-plane seismic strengthening of existing timber floors, a particularly efficient solution consists of an overlay of plywood panels fastened to the sheathing. This technique allows a great improvement in strength, stiffness, and energy dissipation of the floors. Yet, when adopting this strengthening solution for existing floors in highly seismic regions, the target design loads could require large values of in-plane strength and stiffness for the retrofitted diaphragms, and this could cause their beneficial, dissipative potential to be reduced. Thus, in this work, a strengthening solution is presented, able to retrieve high strength and at the same time activate large energy dissipation in the floors. The proposed technique consists of the creation of two independent shear planes by means of two different superimposed overlays of plywood panels. Previously developed analytical and numerical models describing the in-plane response of floors retrofitted with a single plywood overlay were adapted for the present case with two overlays, validating the results against an experimental test conducted on a sample representing a floor portion. Very good agreement was obtained between experimental and analytical as well as numerical results, thus the proposed approaches enable an efficient design process and an accurate simulation of the proposed retrofitting technique.@en