Structural Analysis of Historical Cantilevered Stone Staircases

Abstract This paper studies the behaviour of historical cantilevered stone staircases. In Transylvania these types of stairs are found mainly in buildings classified as historical monuments built until the 1920s. Understanding the behaviour of historical staircases is essential when proposing consolidation or restoration interventions in buildings. In this work, structural analyses on simple models of staircases made of stone elements are proposed in order to investigate the stiffness of the assembly, the stresses that appear in the elements, deformations, the influence of the railings in the overall behaviour and the simulation of the breaking of a single individual step. The types of staircases investigated in this paper are existing historical structures that currently are no longer built from scratch, so the purpose of the calculation is not to dimension but to verify the existing structure.