Download or read book Application of the Hybrid Finite/Discrete Element Method to the Numerical Simulation of Masonry Structures written by Paola Costanza Miglietta and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masonry is one of the most common construction techniques around the world. Unfortunately, it is also among the most sensitive to the risk of failure due to exceptional types of loading, such as, but not limited to, earthquakes. In order to properly design new structures and assess the strength of the existing building stock, it is important for the engineering community to have a reliable means of performing numerical simulations of masonry structures. Masonry is characterized by being a composite material, which translates into greatly inhomogeneous and anisotropic behaviour. Typical numerical tools do not account explicitly for these features of the material, and those that do often require a high level of information about the structure in order to properly calibrate some of their many parameters. This research introduces a new numerical tool, the Finite/Discrete Element Method (FDEM), as a possible solution to this problem. In this method the discontinuities between different materials are explicitly accounted for in the simulation. The structure and the materials are explicitly modelled with little to no need for numerical calibration. FDEM, implemented in the software Y-Brick, has been used to replicate the results of experiments on masonry structures of different level of complexity. Some of the experiments were performed at the University of Toronto as part of this research; other have been collected from the technical literature. The software has been shown to be able to reproduce the experimental results from both the quantitative and the qualitative points of view, suggesting that it could become a valid tool for the simulation of the behaviour of complex masonry and structures under the effects of various types of loadings.