Application of Modal Testing Techniques to a Monitored Building Structure

The “Our Lady of Tears Shrine” in Syracuse has been recently included in the network of public constructions of the Italian Observatory of Structures (OSS), created by the Italian Dept. of Civil Protection to locally monitor their seismic behaviour: the local monitoring system allows to permanently monitor the structural response, under the control of a network central computer, installed in the National Seismic Service headquarters. The usefulness of structural monitoring systems for the application of dynamic identification techniques represents a more and more important issue in the case of structures of critical interest for the management of seismic emergency and for the complexity of their structural scheme. On the other hand, dynamic identification techniques are able to single out the dynamic properties of a structure (natural frequencies, mode shapes and damping characteristics), in order to improve the calibration and validation of its numerical model.