An adaptive multiscale strategy for the damage analysis of masonry modeled as a composite material

In recent years, multiscale models have been successfully employed for investigating the overall mechanical behavior of several heterogeneous structures, such as concretes and composite materials, even in the presence of damage growth and other nonlinear phenomena, with the final aim of reducing the typically huge computational cost of fully microscopic models. In this paper, a novel concurrent multiscale method is applied to masonry structures, able to overcome the limitations of existing masonry homogenization approaches in the presence of strain localization; this method is devoted to the damage analysis of periodic masonries under in-plane loading, based on a multilevel domain decomposition approach equipped with an adaptive zooming-in criterion for detecting the zones affected by strain localizations. The validity of this strategy is assessed by performing multiscale numerical simulations on a three-point bending test and comparing the related results with those obtained from direct numerical simulations, carried out by using a full-scale microscopic model. Finally, additional comparisons have been carried out with experimental and numerical results taken from the literature.