P-Bézier energy optimisation for elastic solutions of masonry-like panels

The equilibrium problem for masonry-like materials in the Heyman sense can be formulated looking for a minimum of the complementary energy functional defined in the field of admissible stress tensors, belonging to the class of negative semi-definite tensors. The classical mixed boundary problem for a masonry panel is developed assuming that the stress is uniaxial so it is possible to express the complementary energy as a function of the slope of compressive rays which characterise the uniaxiality of the stress field. In this work, a family of proximity curves defined starting from a Bézier curve with three control points to model the slope function is employed. Two structural cases are solved, pure shear displacements and shear-flexural-tensile ones, showing the usefulness of the method when applied to the analysis of masonry piers.