Modal pushover and response history analyses of a masonry chimney before and after shortening

• Seismic responses of post-earthquake shortened and original 50 m high chimneys.
• FE models use solid elements with suitable constitutive and damage laws.
• Use of Modal Pushover Analysis (MPA) and nonlinear Response History Analysis (RHA).
• Original chimney: MPA well reproduces lateral displacements and damage localization.
• Shortened chimney: 1st-mode governed damage for MPA, higher-mode effects for RHA.

The 50 m high masonry chimney located in the old industrial facility that houses the School of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, Italy, suffered severe damages during the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence. Afterward, for security reasons, the upper damaged 12.40 m were disassembled. Both before and after shortening, the ratio between the effective mass of the fundamental mode and the total mass is approximately 20%, leading standard pushover analysis methods not to be appropriate for estimating the seismic demand. Using a single, consistent 3D FE formulation, the results of a Modal Pushover Analysis (MPA) and four nonlinear Response History Analyses (RHA) for the shortened and the original chimney were presented in the paper. The ground motions considered in the simulations are accelerograms recorded during recent and less recent devastating seismic events in Italy, New Zealand, and Japan.For both chimneys, a very good agreement between MPA and RHA was observed in terms of lateral displacements. Moreover, for the 50 m high chimney, a strong similarity was observed between the damage maps deriving from the MPA and those obtained with the RHA. All analyses confirmed a significant contribution of the higher modes. For the shortened chimney, the MPA revealed damages in the lower part of the stack (8–21 m), because of a prevailing influence of the fundamental mode. In the RHA, a more evident contribution of the higher modes was observed, probably because of the effect of the vertical component of the ground motion, not accounted for in the MPA.