New trends in mechanics of masonry

Masonry constructions are an important part of the historic and architectural heritage of many countries and the analysis of their safety conditions, as well as the design of repair and strengthening interventions, is a challenging task. Many efforts have been devoted in the past to develop methodologies able to accurately reproduce masonry structural response. Relevant and even pioneer contributions can be found proposing analytical methods to evaluate the limit load of masonry elements, such as walls and arches. Simplified approaches have been also formulated to analyze masonry construction behavior under vertical and horizontal loading conditions, developing easy and fast procedures. Owing to the enormous advancement of the computational tools, the last decades have witnessed a wide spread of the numerical modeling techniques, especially in the field of mechanics of heterogeneous materials like masonry. Therefore, a large variety of numerical models for masonry has been formulated and applied to reproduce experimental and real cases.