Restrained shrinkage of massive masonry walls

Restrained shrinkage of massive, one-storey, non-load bearing masonry walls with one-sided restraint has been simulated. A discontinuum model, including tensile and shear failure of mortar joints is employed to reproduce masonry behaviour in crack zones. Where cracking is not expected, masonry is modelled as an elastic continuum. The model is implemented in the commercial finite element programme ANSYS. The simu-lations show that cracking of walls is delayed if slip joints with low cohesion are applied at the wall foundation boundary or if weaker, lime rich mortars are employed instead of strong, cement rich mortars.