Stress and Strain Tensors in Granular Medium Application to Masonry Structures

The general framework of the present paper is the modeling of stone work, subject to dynamic loads. In this study, a masonry structure is considered as a collection of rigid blocks, linked together by Coulomb’s type friction laws. We define on such a granular medium, a stress tensor and a macroscopic strain tensor, on an elementary cell. The definition of these tensors allows us to get, locally, an average information on this granular medium.Copyright © 2003 by ASME