Europe’s historic stone and brick buildings, bridges, and monuments are at risk of crumbling during earthquakes, and current computer models cannot reliably predict how they will break. Existing models either simulate every brick and mortar joint individually—which demands enormous computing power—or use simplified “macroscale” approaches that ignore key failure behaviours, such as how masonry cracks, slides, and separates under seismic shaking. This gap means engineers cannot accurately assess which structures need reinforcement or how they will perform in a real quake. This project will build a new macroscale modelling strategy that captures the full range of mechanical failures in unreinforced masonry without the prohibitive computational cost of finer-scale models. The team will also develop an efficient method to generate the material properties needed for large-scale dynamic analysis. They will test the approach against two real historical structures that were damaged by earthquakes. If successful, the work will give engineers and heritage authorities a practical, validated tool to assess seismic risk for thousands of culturally significant buildings across Europe—without needing supercomputers or months of simulation time.
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Earthquake loading is a major threat to the safety of historical unreinforced masonry (URM) structures (e.g. old masonry buildings, bridges, and monuments) located in earthquake-prone regions of Europe. The damage or collapse of URM structures with historical and cultural value not only threatens the safety of people but also brings extremely adverse social and economic effects. Therefore, reliable predictions of the dynamic response of historical URM structures under seismic loading are excessively important. As the existing microscale and mesoscale modelling strategies which model masonry units and mortar joints individually often impose prohibitive computational demands, the macroscale modelling strategy which reduces the modelling effort and computational cost receives wide applications in both research and practice. However, the existing macroscale models often ignore important mechanical behaviour of masonry under seismic loading, limiting their applicability to specific problems. To overcome the deficiencies of existing macroscale models, this project will develop an advanced and general macroscale modelling strategy which fully replicates the important mechanical phenomena involved in URM structures under seismic loading, and propose an efficient homogenization method to generate needed macro-level information for nonlinear dynamic structural analysis. The proposed numerical approach will be validated and applied to two case studies involving realistic historical URM structures which were damaged by earthquakes.
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