Abstract
The development of artillery in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages brought a necessary change in military architecture. This change was a radical rethinking of the entire geometry and architectural design of city walls which required an increase in thickness to resist repeated artillery strikes. The damage due to the impact loads on Middle Age fortification walls is analyzed herein with explicit dynamic analyses. This study was developed both with finite element models and an innovative rigid body-spring model with diagonal springs (RBSM), showing the different peculiarities of these two different approaches and how their results can be integrated. The numerical models clearly showed that the presence of an inner core of softer material tends to modify the impact effects by reducing the degree of damage at the expense of an extension of the damaged area.
Highlights
These were executed on a 3D finite element model (FEM) and a simplified innovative rigid body-spring model with diagonal springs (RBSM) developed from the RBSM proposed by Casolo [19,20,21,22], which has been widely adopted for the seismic analyses of masonry structures
After an introduction which presents an historic reconstruction of the cannon shot and the fortification wall geometry and materials, the computations were carried out with both an FEM and an RBSM by adopting explicit dynamic solvers
The 3D FEM allowed to evaluate the amount of volume of the model that should be involved to obtain reasonable confidence in the results that can obtained by a plane RBSM
Summary
The new walls were built with ditches, great embankments, and were especially shaped in order to prevent having undefended points These elements were characteristics of the bastion forts or Italian fortifications. After brief historical research, the geometry of a typical medieval fortification and the characteristics of a common cannon shot at the end of the Middle Age were reconstructed. The dynamic response of a typical medieval fortification to an artillery attack was investigated through some explicit dynamic analyses These were executed on a 3D finite element model (FEM) and a simplified innovative rigid body-spring model with diagonal springs (RBSM) developed from the RBSM proposed by Casolo [19,20,21,22], which has been widely adopted for the seismic analyses of masonry structures. Since the RBSM is a plane model, in the hypothesis of a gun battery attack, a plane strain model of the cross-section of the wall was considered for the analyses, conveniently defining the model thickness
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