The S4H Team has recently published a new research paper in the journal Engineering Structures. The paper introduces a practical approach for calibrating material PSF, with a particular focus on unreinforced masonry structures. The proposed strategy uses a FORM-based calibration to efficiently address the propagation of both material and model uncertainty. The novelties of the study are threefold: (i) introduction of sensitivity analysis combined with the SDCP method to compute PSF for material uncertainty; (ii) investigation of the effects on PSF calibration when considering different geometries, failure modes, modelling strategies (i.e., discrete approach and FE-based continuum approach), and scales of analysis (i.e., panel and façade wall scales); (iii) derivation of statistical parameters from a literature dataset of numerical predictions for shear–compression tests to represent model uncertainties in estimating PSF.

For more details about this study, please visit our S4H website. The published version of the paper (open access) can also be found here.