Computing Geometric and Mass Properties of Culturally Important Statues for Rigid Body Rocking

The seismic response of statues is motivated by observations from recent earthquakes combined with their high cultural significance. Typically unrestrained with a high coefficient of static friction at its base, a statue can be analyzed as a rigid body which will undergo rocking during seismic excitation. In this paper, a methodology is presented to obtain the critical geometric and mass properties required for numerical rigid body rocking analyses. Two nonintrusive approaches to capture the statue geometry are presented: light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and structure-from-motion (SfM), which generate a three-dimensional point cloud. A Poisson reconstruction algorithm intrinsically filters each point cloud and creates a fully enclosed triangulated surface mesh. Integrating over the surface mesh allows for computation of the required geometric and mass properties for numerical rocking analysis to simulate the seismic response of a statue.