Masonry-like material with bounded shear stress

The constitutive equation of masonry-like materials has been generalized in order to account for a limit to the tangential component of the stress, that is proportional to the normal component. This result has been achieved by suitably modifying the convex set made up of all the admissible stresses. The constitutive equation obtained in this manner retains all the properties of normal elastic materials. The model developed has been implemented in the FEM computer code MADY, and applied to the study of masonry shear-walls and arches under monotonic in-plane loads. The reliability of the proposed model is checked through comparisons with some experimental results.