AN HOMOGENEOUS CONSTITUTIVE MODEL FOR MASONRY

J. LÓPEZ; S. OLLER; E. OÑATE; J. LUBLINER

Conferencia; 4th World Congress on Computational Mechanics; 1998

Masonry is a broadly used material from the beginning of the world life. Despiteits popularity, the analysis of masonry structures is a complex task due to the heterogeneityand non linear material behavior. The need for reliable analysis procedures able to predictdamage evolution and failure in historical construction in order to design efficient repair andmaintenance has motivated the work of many structural analysts in this field. Here the finiteelement method has emerged as one of the most powerful procedures for linear and nonlinear analysis of masonry structures. The main problem pending is the development ofaccurate and efficient constitutive model able to predict the behavior of masonry in the nonlinear range and this has been the motivation of this work.The constitutive model presented is based on the homogenized anisotropic elasto plasticitypreviously developed by the authors [1-6]. The effect of anisotropy is introduced by means of fictitious isotropic stress and strain spaces. The material properties in the fictitious isotropic spaces are mapped in to the actual anisotropic space by means of consistent four-order tensor. The advantage of the model is that the classic theory of plasticity can be used to model the non-linear behavior in the isotropic spaces.Details of the model for masonry structures and its implementation in a general non-linearfinite element code are given. Example of application to the analysis of some masonrystructures are presented showing the efficiency of the model.