A heretical point of view in masonry structures dynamics

Protection from static and dynamic actions is an urgent matter for masonry buildings, which constitute the majority of the world’s architectural heritage. For this reason, the search for best strategies to analyse the mechanical responses of such structures under both dead and seismic loads has been at the centre of a vivid debate within the scientific community for decades. Although many different approaches and computational methods have been proposed in the literature over the years, most of them make reference to no-tension materials, starting from the pioneering work by Heyman in the framework of limit analysis. However, implementing the hypothesis of masonry walls made by rigid blocks interacting through no-tension interfaces often leads to inconsistent results due to possible interpenetrating elements. In dynamic simulations, undesired blocks’ interpenetration forces algorithms to continuously check the compatibility and to eventually stop and restart the analysis with somehow arbitrary initial conditions. By introducing well-established hyperelastic and friction laws at bricks’ interfaces, we propose a heretical strategy that overcomes some difficulties of the above-mentioned approaches, recovering physical consistency and avoiding any interpenetrations.