Multi-scale modeling of damage in masonry structures

The conservation of structures of the historical heritage is an increasing concern nowadays for public authorities. The technical design phase of repair operations for these structures is of prime importance. Such operations usually require an estimation of the residual strength and of the potential structural failure modes of structures to optimize the choice of the repairing techniques.

Although rules of thumb and codes are widely used, numerical simulations now start to emerge as valuable tools. Such alternative methods may be useful in this respect only if they are able to account realistically for the possibly complex failure modes of masonry in structural applications.

The mechanical behaviour of masonry is characterized by the properties of its constituents (bricks and mortar joints) and their stacking mode. Structural failure mechanisms are strongly connected to the mesostructure of the material, with strong localization and damage-induced anisotropy.

The currently available numerical tools for this material are mostly based on approaches incorporating only one scale of representation. Mesoscopic models are used in order to study structural details with an explicit representation of the constituents and of their behaviour. The range of applicability of these descriptions is however restricted by computational costs. At the other end of the spectrum, macroscopic descriptions used in structural computations rely on phenomenological constitutive laws representing the collective behaviour of the constituents. As a result, these macroscopic models are difficult to identify and sometimes lead to wrong failure mode predictions.

The purpose of this study is to bridge the gap between mesoscopic and macroscopic representations and to propose a computational methodology for the analysis of plane masonry walls. To overcome the drawbacks of existing approaches, a multi-scale framework is used which allows to include mesoscopic behaviour features in macroscopic descriptions, without the need for an a priori postulated macroscopic constitutive law. First, a mesoscopic constitutive description is defined for the quasi-brittle constituents of the masonry material, the failure of which mainly occurs through stiffness degradation. The mesoscopic description is therefore based on a scalar damage model. Plane stress and generalized plane state assumptions are used at the mesoscopic scale, leading to two-dimensional macroscopic continuum descriptions. Based on periodic homogenization techniques and unit cell computations, it is shown that the identified mesoscopic constitutive setting allows to reproduce the characteristic shape of (anisotropic) failure envelopes observed experimentally. The failure modes corresponding to various macroscopic loading directions are also shown to be correctly captured. The in-plane failure mechanisms are correctly represented by a plane stress description, while the generalized plane state assumption, introducing simplified three-dimensional effects, is shown to be needed to represent out-of-plane failure under biaxial compressive loading. Macroscopic damage-induced anisotropy resulting from the constituents' stacking mode in the material, which is complex to represent properly using macroscopic phenomenological constitutive equations, is here obtained in a natural fashion. The identified mesoscopic description is introduced in a scale transition procedure to infer the macroscopic response of the material. The first-order computational homogenization technique is used for this purpose to extract this response from unit cells. Damage localization eventually appears as a natural outcome of the quasi-brittle nature of the constituents. The onset of macroscopic localization is treated as a material bifurcation phenomenon and is detected from an eigenvalue analysis of the homogenized acoustic tensor obtained from the scale transition procedure together with a limit point criterion. The macroscopic localization orientations obtained with this type of detection are shown to be strongly related to the underlying mesostructural failure modes in the unit cells.

A well-posed macroscopic description is preserved by embedding localization bands at the macroscopic localization onset, with a width directly deduced from the initial periodicity of the mesostructure of the material. This allows to take into account the finite size of the fracturing zone in the macroscopic description. As a result of mesoscopic damage localization in narrow zones of the order of a mortar joint, the material response computationally deduced from unit cells may exhibit a snap-back behaviour. This precludes the use of such a response in the standard strain-driven multi-scale scheme.

Adaptations of the multi-scale framework required to treat the mesostructural response snap-back are proposed. This multi-scale framework is finally applied for a typical confined shear wall problem, which allows to verify its ability to represent complex structural failure modes.