Structural analysis of historical masonry arches: State-of-the-art and recent developments

The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the main analytical and numerical methods for the assessment of masonry arches , highlighting strengths and weaknesses. The methods are mainly three: i) the Thrust Line Analysis Method; ii) the Mechanism Method; iii) the Finite Element Method. The Thrust Line Analysis Method and the Mechanism Method are analytical methods and are based on two of the fundamental theorems of the Plastic Analysis, while the Finite Element Method is a numerical method that uses different strategies of discretization to analyze these structures.