ABSTRACT
Masonry walls are very sensitive to flexural effects due to low tensile strength which, in turn, greatly influences the load bearing capacity under compression. A relative form description has been introduced to formulate the stability theory of masonry walls. The developed solution procedure provides a powerful tool to solve a wide range of problems related to the stability of masonry walls and to check the existing empirical methods. The analytical solution for linear material models with no-tension was one of the early solutions proposed for masonry and plain concrete materials. When masonry wall divided into 20 elements in the transfer-matrix method, the difference in the values of the capacity reduction between both solutions becomes less than 10-3' Since masonry has a wide variation in the non-linearity of the material model, the proposed solution procedure is further verified with experimental data of masonry walls of different material combinations.
