RESEARCH ARTICLE
FEM-DEM Modeling for Out-of-plane Loaded Masonry Panels: A Limit Analysis Approach
Emanuele Reccia*, 1, Antonio Cazzani2, Antonella Cecchi1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 6
First Page: 231
Last Page: 238
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-6-231
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501206010231
Article History:
Received Date: 28/2/2012Revision Received Date: 3/7/2012
Acceptance Date: 6/7/2012
Electronic publication date: 16/11/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
In this work the performances of the Discrete Element Method (DEM) applied to kinematic limit analyses of the out-of-plane behavior of masonry wall panels (with different textures) are investigated.
A discrete model of masonry is proposed, which assumes that rigid blocks are connected by a mortar interface: this is ap-propriate for historical masonry, where mortar is much more deformable than blocks and joints thickness is negligible. Therefore blocks can be modeled as rigid bodies connected by zero thickness Mohr-Coulomb-type interfaces.
The applied method is known as FEM/DEM, which combines finite and discrete element models.
A comparison with well-known and meaningful examples presented by Giuffrè has been carried out in order to validate this method for studying the behavior of masonry. For this purpose, 2D DEM models reproducing walls sections have been considered: they reproduce masonry walls with different staggered blocks, in particular stack bond and running bond patterns, subjected to lateral loads.