A fundamental study on applicability of discontinuous deformation analysis to masonry architecture

Abstract

In this paper, we study on the applicability of Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (DDA) to dry-masonry structures such as Angkor. Many parameters are needed for DDA and we used contact force as a precision index to set guidelines for some parameters, i.e. closeline setting inside of a block, penalty spring constant, and time step increment. We also measured predominant frequency of block systems composed of different number of blocks and simulated them by DDA. We found that a system of different number of blocks requires different penalty spring constant. With these fundamental studies, we are elucidating collapse mechanism of dry-masonry structures.