Masonry Walls under Membrane or Bending Loading Cases: Experiments and Discrete Element Analysis

Tan Trung Bui (1) , Ali Limam (1)

1 LGCIE - Laboratoire de Génie Civil et d'Ingénierie Environnementale

This research is conducted to gauge the efficiency of Discrete Element Method (DEM) to reproduce the behaviour of masonry walls submitted to in plane or membrane loading, and out of plane or bending loading cases. The efficiency of the DEM is estimated for all nonlinear behaviours, from cracks appearance and associated stress redistributions, cracks propagation, until the failure mechanism related to the ultimate load. The robustness is also evaluated, knowing that different geometrical configuration and loading cases are considered which permits to gauge the effects of the main parameters as geometrical dimensions of the walls, the nature and size of the built blocks, as well as the loading case. Several experimental tests are simulated, some are issued from the literature, and the others are conducted in our laboratory. The numerical simulations campaign using the discrete element method is conducted on 3DEC code. For all the cases, a quite good agreement between the numerical and the experimental results was obtained, which confirms the efficiency and robustness of the DEM method for the quasi-static loading configurations here considered. The good ad equation between the experiments and the simulations is noticed for the main characteristics, as the crack localisation, the bearing capacity of the structure and the failure mode.

Mots clés: discrete element method; masonry walls; membrane loading; bending loading; bending loading.

Domaines: Génie civil

Tan Trung Bui, Ali Limam. Masonry Walls under Membrane or Bending Loading Cases: Experiments and Discrete Element Analysis. The Eleventh International Conference on Computational Structures Technology, Sep 2012, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Paper 119, ⟨10.4203/ccp.99.119⟩. ⟨hal-00802263⟩