Multilevel approach for brick masonry walls - Part II: On the use of equivalent continua

This work investigates the possibility of using equivalent continua within a multilevel strategy for the analysis of brick masonry walls, as prototypes for the in-plane behavior of masonry buildings. This strategy, proposed and discussed in detail in Part I of the same paper, lies in an iterative solution scheme which uses two levels, local and global, of description: the former accounts for the interaction between the single bricks; the latter, modeled as a coarse Finite Element discretization, accounts for global interactions. Within the same Finite Element format and strategy, the paper compares the performances of schemes implementing the identification procedures based on equivalent continua with those implementing the algebraic re-parametrization of the local model proposed in Part I. The former, while suitable for a synthetic representation of masonry behavior, does not prove to be convenient for a multilevel solution strategy.