3D limit analysis of Hall I in the Baths of Diocletian

In Roman Baths the Romans employed groin vaults of great dimen-sions, with maximum span more than 20 m; simple tools of structural analysis of ancient wide span vaulted halls are still lacking, due to ge-ometrical and material complexity. In this paper we study the collapse behavior, under horizontal static action, of a corner cross vault of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome (Hall I). In the present modeling, mason-ry is discretized as a system of interacting rigid bodies in no-tension and frictional contact. The computational code consists in a linear pro-gramming approach which makes use of a series of optimization pack-ages via lower and upper bound techniques of limit analysis. One more task of the proposed problem consists in a suitable description of the overall 3D geometry, here afforded with a specific pre-processing ap-proach.