ON APPLICATIONS OF THRUST LINES TO SIMPLYSUPPORTED NO-TENSION PANELS

The paper details about a method suitable for computing a family of thrust lines in a rectangular, simply supported masonry panel under its own weight. The masonry is assumed as a homogeneous and perfectly no-tension material. Because of the chosen boundary conditions, thrust lines, whose second derivative is equal to the load divided by the thrust, pass through the bottom corners of the panel. The method allows obtaining closed-form solutions, useful for comparison with numerical results. Findings of the paper also suggest that the value of the thrust, which corresponds to the solution of minimal stored energy, can be asymptotically approximated.