Nicko Kassotakis1, Vasilis Sarhosis1, Jon Mills1, Antonio Maria D’Altri2, Stefano de Miranda2, and Giovanni Castellazzi2
1) School of Engineering, Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
{n.kassotakis2,vasilis.sarhosis,jon.mills}@newcastle.ac.uk
2) Department of Civil, Chemical, Environmental, and Materials Engineering (DICAM)
University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy,
e-mail: {antoniomaria.daltri2,stefano.demiranda,giovani.castellazzi}@unibo.it
Keywords: Point cloud, Numerical modelling, Geometry, Micro-modelling, DEM.
Abstract. Over the last few decades significant efforts have been placed on the development of detailed numerical models to predict the mechanical behavior of historical masonry structures. However, an issue faced in the numerical modelling of historic and damaged masonry structures is the development of accurate models to represent their real-world geometries. This paper presents the first stage of a research programme which aims to develop an automatic approach to generate the detailed geometry of masonry from point clouds. Such geometry can then be input into micro models for the structural analysis of masonry structures. In the proposed approach, point clouds generated using the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline were converted into watertight meshes and then voxelized. Models were represented as a sum of cuboid-blocks jointed by zero thickness interfaces. The developed methodology was applied to derive geometries of two small scale masonry specimens constructed under laboratory conditions and a full-scale masonry arch bridge.