Unreinforced masonry spiral staircases have been built for more than two thousand years in castles, churches and palaces, these require structural assessment. For a few decades, the behaviour of “cantilever” has debated among scholars. Several methods used, but due to complex 3D geometry substantial number treads, priori assumptions made about magnitude point application contact forces between ...

Displacement-based seismic design and assessment procedures require as key input parameter estimates of displacement capacities of the critical elements. The displacement capacities of unreinforced masonry (URM) walls are typically determined by means of quasistatic cyclic tests. This paper shows that for URM walls failing in shear the number of applied cycles in quasi-static cyclic tests influ...

This paper presents a computational model for unreinforced masonry structures, where softening plasticity describes the behavior of mortar joints, while brittle phase-field accounts fracture in bricks. The governing equations are derived an energetic framework, ensuring variational and thermodynamic consistency, taking into account non-associative which allows capturing their experimentally obs...

Code design of unreinforced masonry (URM) brick buildings is based on elastic analysis, which requires as input, among others, estimates of the in-plane drift capacity at the considered limit states. Current approaches assess the drift capacity of URM walls by means of empirical models with most codes relating the drift capacity to the failure mode and wall slenderness. Comparisons with experim...