ZHANG, YANYANG1; MACORINI, LORENZO2; IZZUDDIN, BASSAM A.3

1)PhD student, Imperial College London, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, y.zhang10@imperial.ac.uk

2)Lecturer, Imperial College London, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, l.macorini@imperial.ac.uk

3)Professor of Computational Structural Mechanics, Imperial College London, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, b.izzuddin@imperial.ac.uk

In this paper the nonlinear response of brick-masonry arches is investigated using an advanced mesoscale partitioned approach. Past research has shown that detailed numerical descriptions, where bricks and brick-mortar joints are modelled separately, offer a realistic representation of the behaviour of masonry components up to collapse. However, because of the significant computational effort, to date the use of this strategy has been mainly restricted to 2D analysis of masonry arches under the plane strain assumption. This does not allow the investigation of the inherent 3D response especially in the case of arches with complex geometry (e.g. skewed arches) and when masonry arches interact with other structural and non-structural components in complex systems (e.g. masonry bridges). The modelling approach used in this work benefits from pioneering work undertaken previously at Imperial College, where an accurate 3D mesoscale model for masonry and a partitioning approach for parallel processing have been developed. The results of numerical studies, which also include comparisons against experimental results, are presented and discussed.

Keywords: nonlinear analysis, masonry arches, arch-backfill interaction, 3D mesoscale description, domain partitioning approach