A novel genetic algorithm homogeneous approach for the in-plane analysis of masonry walls subjected to settlements

This work presents an investigation on the in-plane behavior of a masonry wall that is subjected to a ground settlement in its bottom-right corner. Three distinct modeling strategies are here employed: the first two are the traditional heterogeneous and homogeneous approaches, the third a novel Genetic Algorithm adaptive homogeneous approaches. The traditional heterogeneous approach adopts a discretization of the masonry wall in which each brick is modeled as a single element. The traditional homogenous approach instead adopts a mesh consisting of triangular elements, which are considered as rigid blocks. For this latter case, the failure surfaces of the interfaces are obtained through a homogenization procedure. Eventually, the GA-adaptive homogeneous approach adopts a mesh consisting of a limited number of rectangular elements; subsequently, the initial mesh is iteratively modified to identify automatically the actual position of the cracks originated from the application of the settlement. It is also shown that the GA-adaptive homogeneous approach requires a reduced computational effort with respect to the traditional techniques.