Masonry identification as Cosserat continua via an optimization approach

A structural identification methodology via an optimization procedure is proposed for masonry structures. From the description of these materials at microscopic level, as systems of interacting rigid elements with elastic interfaces, an approach to derive the constitutive aspects of the relative continuum model for a macroscopic description is presented. To solve this problem we refer to micropolar theory (Cosserat), that has been shown to be able to describe the mechanical behaviour of brick/block masonry while accounting for the arrangements of the components and, differently from the Cauchy model, for their size and orientation. The aim of the work is to evaluate the capability of the Differential Evolution Algorithm to identify the constitutive properties of the micropolar continuum exploiting the natural frequencies of a modeled masonry structure. Some preliminary results are presented and discussed.