I am searching for a software package and some resources to model and analyze cracked masonry units. Could you suggest any program which is easy to use and gives good results?
COMSOL Multiphysics is a good one, user friendly, easy to use, unfortunatelly not open source.
You could use UDEC (http://www.itascacg.com/software/udec) or 3DEC (http://www.itascacg.com/software/3dec), Itasca software for modelling discontinuous media , it is intended for rock models but can be used for masonry too.
There are two main trends in fracture modeling: XFEM and CZM. Both with advantages/disadvantages.
ABAQUS has support for both I believe (I know CZM for sure).
I found Ansys static structural very useful and quite intuitive for crack analysis. however if you have time and are familiar with dynamic explicit, that could give you more accurate results depending on what you're looking for but you need to pre-obtain several parameters comparing to static to go on with dynamic, but worth trying.
Although I guess software really does not matter. If you define a simplified geometry along with pre-calculated boundary condition/constraints as well as studied material property, you get what you want in any software.
Why you insist model using FEM. I think for your purpose DEM is a suitable method. You can use UDEC software for simulating, and there is a similar example in the manual od this software.
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