ArchNURBS: NURBS-Based Tool for the Structural Safety Assessment of Masonry Arches in MATLAB

A new approach toward a fully computer-aided design (CAD) integrated structural analysis of arched masonry structures is proposed and a new MATLAB-based computational tool, named ArchNURBS, is developed. It is addressed to professionals dealing with the restoration or structural rehabilitation of historical constructions, who need to assess the safety of masonry arches under assigned load distributions. By using it, they can easily produce estimates of the carrying capacity of curved masonry members, and specifically arches of arbitrary shape. A CAD environment, which is very popular among professionals, can be employed to provide a nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS) representation of arch geometry. On the basis of this representation, it is possible to perform both an elastic isogeometric analysis and a limit analysis of the structure up to the collapse load. Moreover, the developed tool is devised for handling the presence of fiber-reinforced polymers reinforcement strips at the extrados and/or intrados. This allows for the design of properly dimensioned reinforcement and its verification according to current building codes. The entire procedure relies upon a sound theoretical background. ArchNURBS is going to be freely distributed as an open-source project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/archnurbs/).