Out-of-plane homogenized failure surfaces of masonry through a novel voxel approach

This paper presents an innovative procedure for deriving out-of-plane homogenized failure surfaces of masonry test-windows. The procedure is called "voxel approach" because is based on the creation of a 3D fimte element mesh directly from the outline of a masonry cell, in which each 2D pixel is transformed into a 3D voxel and then into a single finite element. Subsequently, a kinematic limit analysis problem is solved within a Matlab script to extract the out-of-plane homogenized failure surfaces of masonry. Two different surfaces are extracted, exploring two sets of moment conditions. A stretcher bond masonry test-window is investigated, for which the two failure surfaces and three relevant failure modes are extracted. The final failure surfaces for this sample test-window are consistent with analogous results from a previous work, and the failure modes are consistent with the expectations, confirming the validity of the homogenized limit analysis as formulated in this work.