LAUSR

Abstract Masonry buildings comprise a major fraction of the total buildings globally. Analysis of masonry buildings is challenging due to underlying uncertainties in material properties, variation in construction system, workmanship discrepancies, and analysis schemes. At present, several finite element approaches are available for masonry modeling; however, most of such methods are sophisticated as they require huge computational efforts, time, and realistic allocation of material properties. Thus, there is a need for a simple yet representative method to capture the complex behavior of masonry buildings. To this end, we propose a displacement-based Simplified Frame Model (SFM) to analyze masonry structures. Details of the methodology including the analysis results are presented in this paper. Nonlinear static pushover analysis is adopted for finite element modeling of the prototype building. A comparison between the analytical and experimental results highlights that the SFM can be effectively used for masonry analysis assuring less computational efforts.