Photogrammetric, Geometrical, and Numerical Strategies to Evaluate Initial and Current Conditions in Historical Constructions: A Test Case in the Church of San Lorenzo (Zamora, Spain)

Identifying and quantifying the potential causes of damages to a construction and evaluating its current stability have become an imperative task in today’s world. However, the existence of variables, unknown conditions and a complex geometry hinder such work, by hampering the numerical results that simulate its behavior. Of the mentioned variables, the following can be highlighted: (i) the lack of historical information; (ii) the mechanical properties of the material; (iii) the initial geometry and (iv) the interaction with other structures. Within the field of remote sensors, the laser scanner and photogrammetric systems have become especially valuable for construction analysis. Such sensors are capable of providing highly accurate and dense geometrical data with which to assess a building’s condition. It is also remarkable, that the latter provide valuable radiometric data with which to identify the properties of the materials, and also evaluate and monitor crack patterns. Motivated by this, the present article investigates the potential offered by the combined use of photogrammetric techniques (DIC and SfM), as well as geometrical (NURBs and Hausdorff distance) and numerical strategies (FEM) to assess the origin of the damage (through an estimation of the initial conditions) and give an evaluation of the current stability (considering the deformation and the damage).