503 IFireSS 2017 – 2 nd International Fire Safety Symposium Naples, Italy, June 7-9, 2017 MASONRY VAULTS MADE BY CALCAREOUS STONE UNDER FIRE CONDITIONS Marianovella Leone 1 Maria Antonietta Aiello 2 ABSTRACT The analysis of the resistance to fire of masonry vaults represents an open issue due to the lack of analytical and/or experimental investigations in the technical literature as well as to the absence of national and international standard treating the specific topic. However, the Italian building heritage is often characterized by vaulted structures that need to be analysed also from a fire resistance point of view. To this scope in the present work, a first approach to study the behaviour of masonry vaults under thermal actions is reported taking into account the effect of the main influencing parameters. 1 INTRODUCTION In recent years, international and national standards address the problem of resistance to fire. In particular, in the case of masonry vaults complex methods for the assessment of structural safety in case of fire are required. As well known, the maintenance of structural stability of a masonry vault during a building re is necessary for the preservation of integrity, to compartment a re preventing spread to other building areas, and to mitigate the local structural collapse, facilitating the safe evacuation of the building occupants. A the date several researches and standards are available in the case of reinforced concrete structures [1-5] while few information are available in relation to the masonry structural elements. In addition, the available data are further reduced in the case of fire resistance of curved decks. However, the masonry vaults often represent the typical structural deck of many Italian historic and cultural buildings and it is essential the identification of standard procedures for the evaluation of their fire resistance. In this work, the issue of masonry vaults subject to fire loading is addressed by means a thermo- structural finite element model. In particular, the fire resistance of masonry vaults, varying its thickness and span and the conductivity of the material was studied. In addition, an analysis was carried out regarding the influence of the boundary conditions. 1 Assistant Professor. Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento. ITALY. e-mail: marianovella.leone@unisalento.it. Corresponding Author. 2 Full Professor. Department of Engineering for Innovation, University of Salento. ITALY. e-mail: antonietta.aiello@unisalento.it.