LAUSR

Many ancient city walls have stability problems such as internal damage, surface weathering and erosion, and even degradation of bearing capacity. The protection of ancient city wall has thus become a serious problem to be solved, and this study was carried out to provide specific protection recommendations. We identified and classified the failure modes of a number of ancient city walls and give specific protection recommendations for different kinds of failure modes. Based on numerical simulation, the analysis of the failure mechanism of an ancient city wall in Beijing has put forward. We found that the main failure mode of ancient city wall is rainstorms and that the rainfall degree, the duration of rainfall, and the presence of permeable channels in the wall all have a significant impact on the deformation of the wall, and there may have a bulging phenomenon in the lower part of the surface of the wall; in addition, the temperature has little effect on the deformation of the wall. Our classification method can be applied to identify the failure modes of similar ancient buildings and can provide suggestions for protective measures.