Análisis estructural de cerchas descritas en el tratado español del siglo XVI “Los veintiún libros de los ingenios y de las máquinas”

Abstract

During the European Renaissance there were written a lot of books relating to engineering matters and, because of this it is possible to have firsthand information about the technology capacity available on that period, as well as the description of many technical solutions adopted back then. In Spain, one of the most important technical treatise is Los veintiún libros de los ingenios y de las máquinas, formely attributed to Juanelo Turriano (Cremona, 1500 - Toledo, 1585) and nowadays attributed to Pedro Juan de Lastanosa (Monzón, 1527 - Madrid, 1576).This treatise, in spite of its principal objective of describing and studying the machines, deals with contruction and infrastructure matters. Among its contents, there are some wood roof trusses for buildings for technical and productivity activities, some with unusual geometries.The editions of this treaty consulted in the present work are the one available in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica: http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?id=0000099602&page=1 of the National Library of Spain, which is a scanned version of the original document; and the one published in 1996 by the Juanelo Turriano Foundation, transcribed from the original, at: http://juaneloturriano.oaistore.es/opac/ficha.php?informatico=00000113.This paper deals with the structural analysis of the main roof trusses considered in the treatise “Los veintiún libros…” which is going to allow, on the one hand, to appreciate the efficiency of the solutions showed on the book and, on the other hand, the present application possibilities of it with regard to the construction of structures with wood elements. or this purpose, several calculations and simulations are carried out using the SAP2000® finite element structural calculation program, a code currently used to calculate this type of flat structures. From the original geometry of the trusses sketched in the Renaissance technical treaty studied, different lights are considered to cover, with which a parameterized analysis of them is achieved. After the comparison of the results, several conclusions are stated about the structural and resistive characteristics of the trusses under analysis.