Experimental and numerical analysis of mechanical interaction of masonry bricks and mortar

Abstract

Unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings represent a large portion of the buildings around the world. As we know large numbers of these structures have not been designed for seismic loads and structural walls of these buildings were primarily designed to resist gravity loads. Therefore moderate to strong earthquakes can devastate entire cities or villages resulting in massive death toll and cause extensive losses. Hence retrofitting of these structures and improving their strength is significant and vital. For retrofitting of any structure it is particularly important to understand mechanical interactions between its components and elements. In this paper, the mechanism of mechanical interaction between brick and mortar is presented. A general modeling and implementation of contact interaction are demonstrated. The contact parameters are defined and the procedures of assessment and evaluation of contact parameters are introduced. Finally, the numerical results are obtained for different bond parameters which show a good agreement with experimental results.