In-plane Behavior of Iron-Framed Masonry Panels: Numerical Analyses

The ‘baraccato’ system is a typical building technique for masonry structures with clever earthquake resilient features, used for the reconstruction of historical city centers in Europe and especially in the South of Italy after some seismic events occurred in the 18th–19th centuries. An atypical and very innovative ‘baraccato’ system was realized in the Ischia Island at the end of the 19th century, when it was characterized by masonry walls encaged in iron frames other than timber elements. The paper presents the results of extensive numerical analyses on the behavior of such iron-framed masonry walls, with reference to both slender and squat geometrical configurations. The analyses are mainly focused on the assessment of: a) the more appropriate modeling strategies for simulating the connection between the iron frames and the masonry walls, b) the contribution of the iron frames on the overall nonlinear behavior of the masonry walls by means of push-over analyses. To achieve these goals, two models and corresponding software are used and compared for the numerical analyses, i.e. DIANA for the finite element model (FEM) and 3DMacro for the discrete macro-element model (DMEM).