ABSTRACT
Macroelement models are widely used within an equivalent-frame approach to study the seismic behaviour of URM buildings. Their application to reinforced masonry structures has not yet been verified, although appearing promising for the expected compromise between computation burden and accuracy of the results. In this work, a new macroelement-based strategy to model the in-plane nonlinear behaviour of RM piers is proposed, starting from a macroelement model widely adopted for URM and implemented in the TREMURI software. The strategy consists in discretising a masonry pier into sub-macroelements, representative of masonry and horizontal (shear) reinforcement, with nonlinear beams representing vertical reinforcement. To test the efficiency of this model, experimental tests performed on RM piers were simulated. Afterwards, assemblies of piers were studied. The results of these simulations appear promising and suggest the application of the proposed model for nonlinear analyses of entire RM buildings, as a future development of this work.
