ABSTRACT
Masonry is one of the oldest known building materials. Despite the complexity of designing and understanding the behaviour of masonry under many load combinations, masonry still represents a competitive choice to other building materials in many areas of the world because of masonry’s low cost, flexibility in creating good classical shapes, fire resistance and thermal properties. The complexity of predicting masonry behaviour results from the use of different materials, units and mortar, as well as the variation in the unit and mortar properties. The interaction between the units and the mortar plays an important role in defining masonry strength. A micro-modeling technique has been developed to provide a non-linear, numerical material model for brick masonry. The model incorporates the non-linear behaviour of the masonry, initial geometric imperfections and non-linear contact properties to represent the normal, tangential and cohesive behaviour of the interaction. 12 different walls with different slenderness ratios and load eccentricities have been modelled using the proposed technique and verified against the experimental test results of Sandoval et al (2011). The model results are found to be in good agreement with the experimental results.
