ABSTRACT
In most masonry arches stresses are very low and, therefore, collapse does not occur because of material failure. As a consequence, the safety of arches should not be assessed by means of a safety factor based on material strength as for conventional structures. In 1969 Heyman was the first to state that the safety of masonry arches relies on their geometry and proposed a method for computing the so-called "geometrical factor of safety" based on the comparison between the shape of the thrust line and the profile of the arch. In this context, we have recently developed a method capable of computing the line of thrust closest to the geometrical axis and defining a safety factor based on the comparison between such a line of thrust and the profile of the arch, which we have denoted as "performance factor". In this paper, that supplements the author ref. (Tempesta and Galassi, 2019 [41]), the Matlab code of our method is provided for unlimited and unrestricted use by researchers as well as academics for educational purposes. â¢The method (denoted as FRS Method) is inspired by the method proposed by Heyman in 1969â¢Unlike the original iterative method, the FRS Method computes the line of thrust using a one-step procedure, which is less time consuming and provides the exact solutionâ¢The original geometrical factor of safety is replaced by a performance factor, that characterizes the range of the equilibrium thrust lines within the profile of the arch effectively and the safety factor in a targeted way.
