Ricerc@Sapienza

Free energies with many small wiggles, arising from small scale micro-structural changes, appear often in phase transformations, protein folding and friction problems. In this paper we investigate gradient flows with energies E_epsilon given by the superposition of a convex functional and fast small
oscillations. We apply the time-discrete minimising movement scheme to capture the effect of the local minimizers ofE_epsilon in the limit equation as epsilon tends to zero.

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.