Abstract
The masonry structures represent a remarkable portion of the world's built heritage. The preservation of these buildings requires a multidisciplinary diagnostic approach that includes a structural assessment to estimate their stability. However, this task remains difficult because of the high nonlinearity behavior of the masonry material and the complexity of the geometries of this type of building. For this reason, several robust modeling strategies have been developed. Among these strategies, block-based models (BBM) based on the discrete element method and more specifically the NSCD "Non Smooth Contact Dynamics" allows to take into account the actual geometrical texture of masonry. However, in this type of approach, blocks are generally rigid or elastic and nonlinearity appears only at the interfaces between blocks governed by cohesive frictional laws. In this study, a new hybrid approach is