A simple homogenized micro mechanical model for the analysis at the collapse of out-of-plane loaded masonry walls

The paper presents a simple micro-mechanical model for the limit analysis of out-of-plane loaded masonry walls by means of homogenization techniques. In this framework, masonry thickness is subdivided into several layers and for each layer polynomial distributions for the stress fields are a-priori assumed inside a fixed number of sub-domains. In this way, a simple linear programming problem is derived with the aim of obtaining out-of-plane homogenized failure surfaces of masonry. Finally, such strength domains are implemented in FE limit analysis codes for upper and lower bound analyses on entire masonry panels out-of-plane loaded. One of these numerical analyses is reported in order to show the reliability (in terms both of collapse loads and failure mechanisms) of the model at hand in comparison with experimental data.