Publication
Using locally available, unprocessed stones as construction material offers a promising solution to meet the modern construction industry's sustainability and low-carbon footprint requirements. Stone masonry construction typically depends on the expertise of skilled craftsmen, who arrange stones on-site based on their experience and intuition. This reliance on expert knowledge represents a significant barrier to the broader adoption of stone as a construction material. Also, the resulting structures often exhibit unique and irregular textures, introducing high levels of uncertainty in structural analysis and complicating their design, verification, control, and management.
To increase construction efficiency and modeling accuracy using digital technologies, this thesis developed computational methods for planning microstructure and performing microscale structural analysis. These methods have been applied in an experiment to demonstrate a digital construction pipeline for building mortar-joint stone masonry walls.
The microstructure planning algorithms were developed based on traditional masonry practices, arranging stones for 2D dry-joint masonry walls and for 3D mortar-joint masonry walls. For dry-joint masonry walls, the algorithms also consider placement stability and the structural performance of the wall. As validation, a multi-leaf wall with a stone layout generated by the algorithm was physically constructed using a robotic arm and tested under simple compression loading. The results demonstrate that the algorithms can efficiently plan stone arrangements, producing virtual and physical walls that are comparable to those built by skilled masons in terms of filling, horizontality, interlocking, and resistance.
To predict and analyze the performance of stone masonry walls while accounting for the influence of microstructure, I developed a rigid block modeling approach that explicitly represents both stones and mortar. Limit analysis and nonlinear static analysis were formulated as optimization problems, incorporating inequality constraints to model cracking, crushing, and shear failure. The numerical simulations were validated against data from various experiments in the literature and the test on the robotically constructed wall, predicting failure mechanisms and force displacement curves that closely aligned with the experimental results.
The research presented in this thesis forms key components of the digital construction pipeline using irregular stones. It includes solutions ranging from geometric digital twinning to structural analysis and from virtual design to physical construction, contributing to sustainable and reliable building practices with unprocessed materials.