Title: P-Bézier energy optimisation for elastic solutions of masonry-like panels

Authors: Antonio Fortunato; Antonio Gesualdo; Ida Mascolo; Michela Monaco

Addresses: Department of Civil Engineering, University of Salerno, Fisciano (SA), Italy ' Department of Structure for Engineering and Architecture, University of Naples 'Federico II', Napoli, Italy ' Department of Civil Engineering, University of Salerno, Fisciano (SA), Italy ' Department of Engineering, University of Sannio, Benevento (BN), Italy

Abstract: The equilibrium problem for masonry-like materials in the Heyman sense can be formulated looking for a minimum of the complementary energy functional defined in the field of admissible stress tensors, belonging to the class of negative semi-definite tensors. The classical mixed boundary problem for a masonry panel is developed assuming that the stress is uniaxial so it is possible to express the complementary energy as a function of the slope of compressive rays which characterise the uniaxiality of the stress field. In this work, a family of proximity curves defined starting from a Bézier curve with three control points to model the slope function is employed. Two structural cases are solved, pure shear displacements and shear-flexural-tensile ones, showing the usefulness of the method when applied to the analysis of masonry piers.

Keywords: masonry panel; mixed boundary problem; complementary energy; energy optimisation; proximity curves; P-Bézier curves.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMRI.2022.119857

International Journal of Masonry Research and Innovation, 2022 Vol.7 No.1/2, pp.113 - 125

Received: 19 Aug 2020
Accepted: 29 Dec 2020
Published online: 22 Dec 2021 *

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