NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS BASED ON 3D DEM FOR MASONRY BLOCKS SHAKING TABLE TESTS AND MASONRY STONE WALLS INCLINATION TESTS

Abstract

 Since a masonry stone wall is vulnerable structure to strong earthquake motion, the masonry stone walls and the turrets of the Kumamoto castle have suffered severe damages during the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes. Although Kumamoto city has been considering some seismic reinforcements for the damaged structures, they have not been able to confirm the effects of the countermeasures yet.

 In this study, we conducted two tests; the repose angle tests of cobblestones and the inclination experiments of brick walls with back-fill cobble stones. We constructed three dimensional Discrete Element Method (DEM) by extending the open source analytical software YADE. We investigated the validation of the methods with polyhedral and some spherical clump models for the above two tests and the past shaking table test for wooden blocks. As the results, all of the three tests were accurately reproduced by the numerical analyses, and we confirmed the validation of analytical method with the clump models.