A fibre beam based approach for the evaluation of the seismic capacity of masonry arches

The paper proposes the use of a fibre beam-based methodology to study the dynamic behaviour of masonry arches and arch bridges. The approach, previously used for load-carrying capacity assessment, allows for a detailed description of both the nonlinear material properties and the seismic action, with reasonable computational effort. As a first step, in order to validate the proposed method, the failure condition under acceleration pulse is analysed, and the results are compared with the solution provided by the mechanism method for different geometric configurations. The influence of material behaviour is also investigated. The seismic capacity of masonry arches is then assessed through pushover analyses under different load distributions and IDAs under natural accelerograms to identify a suitable representation of inertial forces arising under earthquake ground motion. Finally, the in-plane seismic capacity of an existing seven-span masonry arch bridge is evaluated. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.