Damage Propagation in Vibrating Masonry Elements using a Nonlocal Description

In this paper, damage propagation in vibrating masonry structures is investigated using finite element analyses.A nonlocal damage-plastic constitutive law is adopted to model the macroscopic behavior of the masonry material.In particular, the material model is able to consider different softening laws in tension and in compression, plastic strains, stiffness recovery and loss as a result of crack closure and reopening.The latter effect is an unavoidable feature for realistically reproducing hysteretic cycles caused by harmonic dynamic loadings.Numerical examples concerning different masonry structures demonstrate the applicability of the computational tool developed for reproducing the dynamic response and the damage path evolution.