Numerical assessment of earthquake-induced pounding damage in unreinforced brick masonry buildings using DE macro-crack networks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Old buildings were often constructed adjacent to each other, without the minimum gap recommended by modern codes. This further increases their seismic vulnerability by exposure to the risk of pounding, a complex mechanism involving repeated impacts between adjacent buildings. Although post-earthquake surveys worldwide confirmed that seismic pounding can significantly increase the extent of in-plane damage and cause early collapses, this phenomenon still remains largely unexplored, while ad-hoc assessment guidelines are missing. This preliminary study focuses on investigating the mechanical in-plane interaction among low-rise unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings of clay brick, a seismically vulnerable yet common structural typology across Canada and abroad. Main novelties consist in the unprecedented use for this task of experimentally validated numerical models developed in the Distinct Element Method (DEM) framework, enabling us to map accurately crack propagation up to collapse, as well as the quantification of key material and geometrical factors affecting earthquake performance. To reduce the otherwise prohibitive computational expense typically entailed by DEM and consider building-scale models, a new macro-modelling strategy is devised that idealizes masonry as an assembly of solid rigid blocks connected by nonlinear interface springs, forming an equivalent macro-crack network where failure occurs according to linearized softening joint constitutive laws. Using this expedited yet accurate analysis technique, firstly, a parametric study is conducted to investigate the influencing factors of pounding of adjacent URM façades including varying height, material degradation levels and the number of adjacent buildings, tested under pushover loading schemes. Then, a comprehensive numerical study of a fixed configuration model is carried out using acceleration time histories of various intensities. Preliminary results, which allowed a comparison of structural response associated with each acceleration time history, seem to suggest that the pounding impact force is particularly dependent on the strength of the ground motion and poundings have the most pronounced effects when buildings are subjected to moderate-intensity earthquakes
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".