Experimental and Analytical Study of the Effect of Skewed Angle on the Bearing Capacity of Semi-circular Brick Vaults

Covering spaces has always been one of the main issues in architectural engineering. Barrel vault is one of the cover types used in traditional structures. In this paper, the effect of skewed angle on the bearing capacity of a semicircular brick vault has been examined. The Experimental studies have been performed in two parts: determining the properties of materials and determining the bearing capacity of the vault. Due to laboratory limitations, scaled models of materials and structure are made used. The loading of the specimens is gravitational force with a constant rate in the middle of the span. The finite element model is developed and validated based on the Willam-Warnke failure criterion parameters. Finally, in order to investigate the behavior of skewed semi-circular vaults the different angles and aspect ratios are studied by analytical models. The important behavioral parameters studied in this research are failure load, maximum displacement, and also the behavioral mechanism of skewed vaults in comparison with non-skewed vaults. The results indicate that in all models, the skewed vault has a lower bearing capacity than the non-skewed vault. The maximum drop in bearing capacity due to skew occurs up to skewed angle of 30 degrees and for larger skewed values, the sensitivity of the structural behavioral parameters to skew decreases. So that for the vault with the aspect ratio of 0.5, with increasing the angle of skew from zero to 30 degrees, the bearing capacity of the vault decreases 58% and 18.74 for increase from 30° to 45°.