
Research and Applications in Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Computation – Zingoni (Ed.)
© 2013 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-00061-2
On the dynamics of stacks of rigid blocks
F. Saitta, P. Clemente & D. Rinaldis
ENEA, Rome, Italy
1 INTRODUCTION
Rocking motion of rigid blocks has been the subject
of many research works. Indeed, many real struc-
tures under various kind of loads can be modeled in
such way.
A first study on the subject was due to Housner
(1963), which was inspired by the survival of some
structure to the Chilean earthquake of May 1960.
Several other works deals with the dynamics of one
block (Facchini et al., 1994;