Abstract
Since energy efficiency has become the main priority in the design of buildings, load-bearing walls in modern masonry constructions nowadays include thermal break elements at the floor–wall junction to mitigate thermal bridges. The structural stability of these bearing walls is consequently affected. In the present paper, a numerical study of the resistance and stability of such composite masonry walls, including AAC thermal break layers, is presented. A finite element mesoscopic model is successfully calibrated with respect to recent experimental results at small and medium scale, in terms of resistance and stiffness under vertical load with or without eccentricity. The model is then used to extend the numerical models to larger-scale masonry walls made of composite masonry, with the aim of investigating the consequences of thermal elements on global resistance and stability. The results confirm that the resistance of composite walls is governed by the masonry layer with the lowest resistance value, except for walls with very large slenderness and loaded eccentrically: composite walls with low slenderness or loaded by a vertical load with limited eccentricities are failing due to the crushing of the AAC layer, while the walls characterized by large slenderness ratios and loaded eccentrically tend to experience buckling failure in the main clay masonry layer.
Highlights
The latest environmental concerns lead to significant changes in the construction of buildings, for residential projects
The composite walls exhibit a similar consistent reduction due to the increase of eccentricity, while the influence of the slenderness on the behavior of composite walls is only evidenced for the walls with large slenderness ratios, i.e., hef /t = 21 and 26
The of 24 through reason is that when composite walls have low slenderness, the failure will15occur a local failure of the Autoclaved Concrete units (AAC) layer, for which the global slenderness does not play any role
Summary
The latest environmental concerns lead to significant changes in the construction of buildings, for residential projects. Bers to behave linearly up to the failure, where tensile strength is not taken into account In such a context, extensive numerical study is conducted in this paper to under explore critical Other studies havean improved the simulation of masonry behavior the behavior of full-scale composite masonry walls incorporating a bottom layer consisting load by including the material non‐linearity, where it has been shown to better estimate of AAC materials. The finite selected tests from Sandoval et al [18,19], on a different scale of homogeneous walls, are element simulations are conducted using a mesoscopic approach using DIANA FEA [35], used to validate numerical models capable of capturing the stability behavior Simulations are extended to composite wall models using the calibrated material input
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