Ricerc@Sapienza

A novel two-scale modeling approach, linking different structural models at macro and microscale, is proposed to describe response of masonry walls with periodic texture. At the higher macroscopic scale, the real heterogeneous material is modeled as a homogenized medium, considering the classical Mindlin-Reissner theory for flat shells. At the lower microscopic scale, a representative masonry Unit Cell (UC), accounting for the actual geometry, arrangement and nonlinear behavior of constituent materials, is analyzed in detail by resorting to a three-dimensional Cauchy model.

A multiscale model for the analysis of the in-plane response of periodic masonry walls is presented. The overall constitutive behavior of the composite material is derived through a homogenization procedure based on the Transformation Field Analysis properly extended to the case of interfaces. At micro level, masonry is modeled as the assembly of expanded units and interfaces representing both mortar and unit-mortar interaction.