Fatigue Assessment and Deterioration Effects on Masonry Elements: A Review of Numerical Models and Their Application to a Case Study

Abstract

Safety assessment with respect to seismic and vertical loads of existing and very old masonry structures is currently a central topic for the scientific engineering community. In particular, there are many ancient bridges still in service that are subjected to higher and more frequent cyclic loads. For these structures, it is important to determine the actual fatigue strength, rather than the ultimate carrying capacity. In this way the remaining service life, with possible traffic load limitations, may be estimated. This paper reports an updated review of the state-of-the art on recently published fatigue models that account for deterioration effects under cyclic loads. In addition, results related to fatigue performance of a bridge are shown and comments are provided. The numerical comparisons among existing fatigue models reveal that the application of the available fatigue models is particularly problematic for ancient masonry elements, where appropriate stress-life curves are required.

Assessment and Restoration of an Earthquake-Damaged Historical Masonry Building

“…Scope of this study is to show the effectiveness of rigid diaphragms on the improvement of the performance of masonry structures under earthquake loading for various safety levels. Furthermore, this study shows that simplified linear analysis can give realistic-even conservative-results and advanced analysis methods (Syrmakezis et al, 1995;Asteris et al, 2005;Kyriakides et al, 2016Kyriakides et al, , 2018Caddemi et al, 2017;Casamassima and D'Amato, 2019), as well as advanced material models (Asteris et al, 2005(Asteris et al, , 2014Asteris and Giannopoulos, 2012;Apostolopoulou et al, 2017) are not always needed, as they require extensive experimental investigations (Chronopoulos et al, 2012;Lysandrou et al, 2017) and time consuming analysis validation (Asteris et al, 2017(Asteris et al, , 2019.…”

Different Approaches to Assess the Seismic Capacity of Masonry Bridges by Non-linear Static Analysis

“…Amongst the existing methodologies, the stress-life approach and numerical analysis are commonly used by scientists. In particular, the stress-life approach to evaluate the fatigue strength of a specific existing bridge has been used in Laterza et al (2017) and Casamassima and D'amato (2019). The authors highlighted the effectiveness of this methodology and praised for further studies to derive new curves.…”