Finite Element Simulation of Thermoelastic Effective Properties of Periodic Masonry with Porous Bricks

Abstract

In this work an integrated approach has been proposed for the determination of the effective mechanical and temperature properties of thermoelastic periodic brick masonry wall with various porous structures. According to the classical method of determining effective moduli of composites, in order to describe internal micro- or macrostructure, we consider a representative volume cell, which enables us to describe effective properties of the equivalent homogeneous anisotropic material. The problems for representative cells are simulated and analyzed as thermoelastic boundary value problems, using special programs in APDL language for ANSYS finite element package. The post processing of the solution gives averaged characteristics of the stress–strain state and thermal flux fields that allow computing the effective moduli of the composite. The proposed method has been applied to several examples of periodic masonry with porous, hollow and porous–hollow bricks. A periodic part of masonry with porous, hollow and porous–hollow bricks was chosen as a representative cell with thermoelastic tetrahedral and hexahedral finite elements. In order to take into account the porosity of the bricks in the masonry, using similar approaches we have preliminary solved at the microlevel the problems of the effective moduli detection for the porous bricks as thermoelastic composite bodies with random porosity structures. After that at the macrolevel the material of porous brick was considered as a homogeneous body with its own effective properties. The results of numerical experiments showed that the structures of the representative cells and porosity could significantly affect the values of the effective moduli for the considered brick masonry walls.