ANALYSIS OF EFFECTIVE ELASTIC PROPERTIES FOR MASONRY WITH DIFFERENT VOID SHAPES AND VARIOUS POROSITY

The paper presents the calculation of the effective properties of masonry as a regular composite structure, which consists of the materials of brick and mortar. For the homogenization of masonry, the effective moduli method is used, which considers the representative volume as a periodic cell of masonry structure. For the inhomogeneous medium of the representative volume, several boundary-value problems of the elasticity theory with special boundary conditions are set, which are solved using the finite element method. The computation results are averaged by the representative volume, which allows computing the full set of the effective moduli for the composite structure. The suggested approach is used for the calculation of the effective properties of masonry made of porous and hollow bricks with various void shapes and number of voids, as well as different porosity. The dependence of the effective moduli values on the brick porosity and void sizes is analyzed.