A numerical model for masonry-like structures

Abstract

Masonry has historically been one of the most widely used construction materials. Despite this, there is a lack of computational tools for the analysis of masonry structures compared with what is available for steel and concrete structures. One of the main reasons is likely to be found in the peculiar mechanical behavior of masonry, which shows a small and unpredictable resistance in tension and a nonlinear inelastic behavior in compression. In this paper we put forward a constitutive model for masonry based on the extension to associate path-dependent plasticity of the classical normal, elastic, no-tension model. This new model allows the onset of fracture and irreversible crushing of the material and accounts for a wider variety of stress states within the structure, highlighting the progress of pseudorigid kinematics. The elastoplastic problem is decomposed into a sequence of nonlinear elastic problems formulated in variational form, which are solved by searching for the minimum of a suitable functional via descent methods. The model is implemented in variational finite element code and validated against analytical solutions and experimental tests. Applications to realistic cases are presented showing the capability of the model to reproduce nontrivial cracking and crushing patterns.

Thrust Network Analysis of Masonry Vaults Subject to Vertical and Horizontal Loads

“…h andt (1) h are the reference thrusts returned by the linear optimization (6) in which it has been set r = r (0) = 0 and r = r (1) = r 1 , r 1 being an arbitrary positive scalar.…”

“…h andt (1) h have been evaluated, the reference thrustst (1) h are used in (8) to obtain the nodal heights and the tentative value r ( j+1) . This estimate of r is used in (11) to obtain a new value of reference thrusts that, in turn, is used again in (8) to obtain a new estimate of r. The procedure is iterated until the convergence condition (9) is fulfilled.…”

“…It was recently contributed by O'Dwyer [10] and fully developed by Block and coworkers in recent times [2,3]. Alternative approaches can be found in [1,4,11].…”

Analysis and Design of Reinforced Concrete Structures as a Topology Optimization Problem

“…Implementing this theoretical model within a numerical code is not trivial, due to well-known instabilities arising when addressing a linear elastic no-tension body through conventional incremental approaches. Recently, [6] has proposed to solve the equilibrium of a no-tension solid resorting to a minimization problem that adopts the displacement field as unknown and the strain energy of the hyper-elastic no-tension body as objective function.…”

Advanced Models for the Limit Analysis of Masonry Structures

“…Several authors of the Italian school of Structural Mechanics has divulgated and extended such model [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. The analysis of masonry-like materials can be conducted within the frame of limit analysis, specifically by applying the static and kinematic theorems on the basis of admissible stress and strain fields (see [18]).…”