1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Tie rods are typically used to transfer axial forces and prevent unwanted displacement on vaults, walls, arches, and buttresses in historical buildings. In order to verify their load-bearing capacity and to identify potential structural damage risks, it is very important to determine the forces transferred by tie rods and the corresponding stresses. Due to the often lack of project documentation for historical buildings, determining the axial forces and verifying the load bearing capacity can be very challenging. This paper presents the determination of axial forces in tie rods and the analysis of seismic actions on it by combining experimental and numerical analysis and finite element model updating.