MESO SCALE OUT OF PLANE SEISMIC ANALYSIS OF A MASONRY CHURCH FAÇADE IN MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC (CANADA)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eastern Canada’s places of worship are vital resources of cultural heritage value, as well as centres of spirituality and social services. In Québec, these buildings date back to centuries ago and are considered critical touristic attractions in North America. Of particular interest from an earthquake engineering perspective are the grandiose Catholic churches built between the 18th and 19th centuries in Montréal, where the odds for a strong moment magnitude seismic event (>M6) are projected to be at least 5-15% in the next 50 years. Such buildings were constructed using traditional techniques imported by the first European settlers and later adapted to the local climate and material availability. Unreinforced masonry (URM) veneers or loadbearing walls, stone shallow foundations, early reinforced concrete (RC), or cast-iron frames were often used in combination with timber diaphragms, creating unique yet under-researched designs that did not feature any seismic detailing. Research ongoing at McGill University is among the first studies seeking to characterize key materials and components of typical old churches in Montréal, with the objective of providing information for their seismic assessment and potential preventive retrofit. In this paper, preliminary results from our first case-study are presented that focus on the church of Saint-Clement (1899), characterized by the simultaneous presence of long-span arches, stone masonry façades, steel/RC components and flexible floors. First, data from archival research and onsite inspections are presented, including architectural evolution and 3D laser scanning. Following, a pragmatic meso-scale analysis of the façade macro-element is proposed using a discontinuum (Distinct Element Method, DEM) computational approach. Preliminary results obtained by non-linear quasi-static analyses enabled us to identify types of out-of-plane failure modes and expected seismic capacities for different types of connections that the façade may have with the walls and the roof, something not available in previous literature in Canada and on which to base future research and tailored retrofit interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".