Coupled diffusion-damage modeling of historical masonry walls

The causes of deterioration of historical masonry structures can be subdivided in two main groups: physical/chemical and mechanical ones. Few are the contributions which address the modeling of the deterioration of these structures accounting for both the above causes and their coupling [1], while some contributions can be found for other materials (see [2], [3]). Within this context, in this work a model for the analysis of masonry walls which couples the mechanical damage process with the environmental deterioration is developed. The mechanics is inspired by the Lagrangean model proposed in [4] and the environmental action is modelled with the diffusion of penetrating agents inside the masonry. The mass flux of external agents is influenced by the mechanical damage and, on the other hand, the constitutive relations for stresses accounts for the environmental effects. Numerical tests show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.