Increasing interest has recently been devoted to interlocking blocks/interfaces capable to enhance the sliding resistance of masonry joints to external forces. In this framework, this paper deals with the assessment of the torsion-shear capacity of the contact interface between the lock and the main body of an interlocking block, assumed to have a cohesive behaviour. The interlocking block is a rigid unit which, on its faces, have square cuboidal locks keeping the adjacent/overlapped blocks together and preventing blocks from sliding. Two numerical approaches and a novel ad hoc experimental investigation are proposed to simulate the torsion-shear behaviour by applying eccentrical shear forces to the lock. First, concave, convex and corrected concave formulations provided by the literature for assemblages of rigid blocks with conventional planar joints are extended to model the interlocking block behaviour. Then, according to a second approach based on the discrete element method, the concave-shaped interlocking block is modelled by convex polyhedrons representing the lock and the main body of the block, considered as individual rigid units stacked over each other with a cohesive contact in between. A novel experimental investigation on the limiting pure shear and torsion-shear combinations at the lock interface made of cohesive material is also presented. Two different mortars were chosen to make the specimens, which were casted using 3D printed moulds, and different test configurations were set up to simulate shear and torsion-shear failures. The analytical and numerical results are compared with each other and against the experimental ones, with interesting remarks on the application of the different approaches.

A limit analysis method for masonry domes composed of interlocking blocks with non-isotropic sliding resistance is under development. This paper reports the first two steps of that work. It first introduces a revision to an existing limit analysis approach using the membrane theory to find the minimum thickness of a hemispherical dome under its own weight and composed of conventional blocks with finite isotropic friction. The coordinates of an initial axisymmetric membrane surface are the optimization variables. During the optimization, the membrane satisfies the equilibrium conditions and meets the sliding constraints where intersects the block interfaces. The results of the revised procedure are compared to those obtained by other approaches finding the thinnest dome. A heuristic method using convex contact model is then introduced to find the sliding resistance of the corrugated interlocking interfaces. Sliding of such interfaces is constrained by the Coulomb’s friction law and by the shear resistance of the locks keeping the blocks together along two orthogonal directions. The role of these two different sliding resistances is discussed and the heuristic method is applied to the revised limit analysis method.

This paper presents a computer aided design tool that analyses the structural feasibility of interlocking assemblages with orthotropic sliding resistance and automatically adjusts the assemblage shape to remove the infeasibility. First, the static problem of limit analysis is extended to the corrugated interfaces. To model different bond patterns and openings, an assemblage is abstracted to different types of joints representing the dry joints between the blocks, joints inside the blocks, and the excluded joints where the openings are located. This problem is then reformulated to measure the structural infeasibility due to the sliding constraint violation. The so-called sliding infeasibility measure shows how far an infeasible model is to become feasible. This problem is used as the objective function of a shape optimization algorithm that minimizes the sliding infeasibility measure through automated change of the interlocking joints, by which the model becomes structurally feasible. The optimization is validated using the discrete element analysis.