Homogenized failure surfaces of rubble masonry

The mesoscale averaging procedure known as homogenization has been widely used over the past decades to draw the global mechanical behavior of masonry starting from that of its constitutive materials. However, its application to rubble masonry structures apparently discords with identification of a Representative Element of Volume, a basic cell capable of generating the considered block arrangement if translated. In this work, a simple Matlab code aiming at deriving homogenized failure surfaces for rubble masonry is presented, inspired by the successful approach developed in a previous work by other researchers and based on the idea of test-windows. After creating a 2D FE mesh from the sketch of a masonry test-window, the code allows the evaluation of homogenized failure surfaces in the tension-tension range. A practical application is carried out by comparing the results on two different textures (running bond v. rubble masonry).