Dynamics and failure mechanisms of ancient masonry churches subjected to seismic actions by using the NSCD method: The case of the medieval church of S. Maria in Portuno

The role of frictional contact of constituent blocks on the stability of masonry domes

“…Similarly, a smooth flow of data was developed between the simulator and the modelling tool. In any case, also the other results obtained with the LMGC90 software [25,26] confirm that the NSCD approach is an efficient and reliable way to study the failure mechanisms of masonry construction works. In fact, this approach can certainly analyse structures under dynamic loads, like a moving truck on an arch bridge but, remarkably, it can also determine the static state of block assemblies and provide information on the collapse mechanism under increasing applied loads [20].…”

Damage assessment of ancient masonry churches stroked by the Central Italy earthquakes of 2016 by the non-smooth contact dynamics method

“…Several studies are currently available in literature dealing with the numerical/ experi-mental analysis of masonry churches. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the non-smooth nature of the dynamic response of churches is not analyzed in depth (Lancioni et al 2013). For this reason, in the present work the dynamics of five different typical masonry churches, damaged during the last Central Italy seismic sequence, are inves-tigated numerically by means of a DEM code which implements the non-smooth con-tact dynamics (NSCD) method (Moreau 1988;Chetouane et al 2005).…”

“…The analyses are done with the solver LMGC90© which is interfaced with a pre-processor, made directly by the authors and able to design complex 3D masonry structures, leading to a better discretization of the real geometries (one of the major drawbacks of the method) decreasing the amount of time required to create them. In fact, respect to previous works (Lancioni et al 2013(Lancioni et al , 2016, a bigger number of solid are implemented with a huge decrease of time to create them, finally increasing the accuracy of the performed calculation. A post-processing program, allowing to plot all the quantities of interest, is used in order to compare the numerical predictions with the real damages.…”

Non-Smooth Contact Dynamics of Planar Masonry Structures Using Mathematical Programming

“…In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of non-smooth contact analysis to dynamics and rocking behavior of masonry block structures [1][2][3][4][5]. This is mainly because this modelling approach allows to take into account contact interactions directly by setting up a system of proper inequalities and complementarity conditions rather than introducing additional elements in the models such in the case of distinct element models, where penalty methods are generally used.…”