17th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering, 17WCEE

Sendai, Japan - September 13th to 18th 2020

Modeling of Unreinforced Masonry Walls with Seismic Soil Structure

Interaction: A Sensitivity Study

L. Lakshmi (1), Prishati Raychowdhury(2), S. Ray-Chaudhuri(3)

(1)
Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Civil Engg., Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, E-mail: lakshmia@iitk.ac.in
(2)
Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil Engg., Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, E-mail: prishati@iitk.ac.in
(3)
Professor, Dept. of Civil Engg., Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India, E-mail: samitrc@iitk.ac.in

Abstract

For construction of buildings and other structures, masonry has been traditonally used for many
years. Unreinforced masonry is a brittle and highly non-linear material with good compressive but
poor tensile strength. Hence, for seismic performance evaluation of masonry structures, it is
important to develop a numerical model that reasonably capture the actual behavior of the materials.
This issue becomes even more important when masonry walls are constructured on compliant soil
without any reinforced concrete beam, which is a common practice for older structures. In this
work, a sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate significant structure and soil modeling
parameters. For this purpose, a 3D finite element simplified Micro-model of a representative wall is
developed wherein the linear and non-linear behavior of expanded units and interfaces are defined.
Expanded units are modeled using 3D hexahedral shaped eight node linear brick elements with
reduced integration and hour glass control (type C3D8R). Joint interfaces are modeled based on a
surface-based cohesive approach. Contacts between adjacent masonry units are defined through a
node to surface discretization method with finite sliding formulation. Hard contact behavior is
defined between the adjacent surfaces of masonry units by the contact pressure-overclosure
relationship. Adopted hard contact behavior assumes that the surfaces transmit pressure when they
are in contact. Penetration and the transfer of tensile stress between the contacting surfaces are
prevented in the hard contact model. It may be noted that the hard contact has the ability to prevent
a surface from penetrating into other surface and also allows a separation between them, after the
contact is established. Tangential Behavior contact can reproduce the friction that occurs on the
connection between the materials defined by the static friction coefficient. Cohesive Behavior
works like a zero thickness rubber, for which one can specify the normal stiffness and the tangential
stiffness of the interface. To define soil-structure interaction at the foundation level, beam on
nonlinear Winkler’s foundation (BNWF) concept is used. First order reliability analysis is then
performed to identify various important modeling paramters. It is envisioned that the finding of this
study will provide better understanding of the modeling issues and will help in developing a better
calibrated model for performce assessment.