An adaptive multiscale strategy for the damage analysis of masonry modeled as a composite material

In recent years, multiscale models have been successfully employed for investigating the overall mechanicalbehavior of several heterogeneous structures, such as concretes and composite materials, even in thepresence of damage growth and other nonlinear phenomena, with the final aim of reducing the typicallyhuge computational cost of fully microscopic models. In this paper, a novel concurrent multiscale methodis applied to masonry structures, able to overcome the limitations of existing masonry homogenizationapproaches in the presence of strain localization; this method is devoted to the damage analysis of periodicmasonries under in-plane loading, based on a multilevel domain decomposition approach equippedwith an adaptive zooming-in criterion for detecting the zones affected by strain localizations. The validityof this strategy is assessed by performing multiscale numerical simulations on a three-point bending testand comparing the related results with those obtained from direct numerical simulations, carried out byusing a full-scale microscopic model. Finally, additional comparisons have been carried out with experimentaland numerical results taken from the literature.