A comparison study of numerical modeling approaches for simulating the in-plane seismic response of masonry walls

Abstract

The extraction of natural gas in the northern part of the Netherlands, from the region of Groningen, has been causing human-induced seismic activities for the past several decades. This is a problem since the existing building stock in this region, which consists of mainly unreinforced masonry buildings and historical structures, are not designed to withstand seismic events due to the lack of empirical earthquake-resistant design features. Further, the combination of a soft topsoil and the gas extraction, is responsible for ground settlements which may compromise the capacity of the existing buildings.

The bed-joint reinforcement technique is a strengthening method which consists of cutting a slot in the bed-joints and installing steel bars embedded in a high-strength repair mortar. Although this strengthening method is commonly applied in the Netherlands to counteract settlement damage, limited investigations on the performance against seismic loading are available in the literature. Therefore, an experimental campaign (Licciardello et al., 2021) was conducted at Delft University of Technology in which a quasi-static cyclic in-plane test on a full scale wall was performed to characterize the performance of the bed-joint reinforcement technique. The wall featured artificially introduced cracks (pre-damage), achieved by the inclusion of plastic sheets between bricks and mortar, to account for the settlement-induced damage. Compared to the un-strengthened walls, tested in a previous experimental campaign (Korswagen et al., 2019) under similar conditions, it is observed that the bed-joint reinforcement technique can provide a significant increment in terms of displacement capacity and ductility of the wall but not in terms of the force capacity.

In this thesis, numerical simulations of both un-strengthened and strengthened walls from the experiments were performed using 2D-models and the nonlinear static analyses (monotonic and cyclic) were carried out in the finite element software DIANA. The objective of this research was to compare different numerical modeling approaches and material models to find the best suited one for simulating the in-plane seismic response of both un-strengthened and strengthened masonry walls. Moreover, the objective was also to extrapolate the experimental results to other wall configurations, which are not experimentally tested, to investigate the combined effect of the bed-joint reinforcement technique and the change in size and location of the window opening on the in-plane response of the wall (parametric study).

In the scope of this thesis, three numerical modeling approaches were investigated (Figure i). The bricks and mortar joints are modeled as one homogeneous continuum in the macro-model. On the other hand, the bricks and mortar joints are modeled separately for the continuous and detailed micro-model where interface elements are included at the brick-mortar bonds for the latter one. The discrete (simplified) micro-model was not investigated because the reinforcement bars cannot be connected to the mortar joints since they are substituted by zero-thickness interface elements. Moreover, the Discrete modeling approach of the reinforcement was used in order to simulate the pull out behavior of the bars. Cracks were modeled using the discrete cracking approach and the smeared cracking approach where the former one was used at the brick-mortar interfaces and the latter one was used for cracking in the mortar joints (micro-models) and in the masonry composite (macro-model)…