Keywords: masonry arch bridges, parametric modelling, fatigue of masonry.

Masonry arch bridges are old structures which form an essential part of the transport infrastructure in numerous countries around the world. As such it is crucial to investigate effects of repeated traffic loading to understand the potential fatigue susceptibility of these masonry structures. Although, there have been some efforts towards understanding the fatigue behaviour of masonry structures under repeated loading, this was mainly achieved via various experimental programs, while useful predictive numerical tools are still largely missing. Thus, this study presents a novel numerical formulation at the mesoscale level that can be used to model material damage evolution, specifically cracking, in the masonry brick-mortar interface. The current formulation utilises the elastic-plastic damage mechanics concept and can phenomenologically model the material degradation or cracking behaviour of the masonry brick-mortar interface, which is considered as the weakest region for the majority of masonry structures. The new fatigue formulation is defined by three material properties for the characterisation of the fatigue behaviour of an interface, and it is expected that these parameters can be easily derived from the component-level testing of masonry specimens subject to high cycle fatigue loading. Preliminary numerical investigations show that the current formulation can provide a useful capability to numerically assess masonry structures subject to subcritical damage due to fatigue loading.

download the full-text of this paper (PDF, 7 pages, 465 Kb)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the volume description