Plaxis 3D Calculation Time

Question

Hi, 
 I am planning to to perform Plaxis 3D analysis for twin tunnel. My computer capabilities are RAM : 16.0 GB Processor : Intel&reg; Xenon&reg; Gold 6148 CPU @ 2.40GHz 2.39 GHz, (8 core). I just want to know what will be the optimized number of elements/nodes so that the calculation time can be limited to maximum of 12 hours. 
 Please Advice.

Stefanos Papavasileiou · Answer

Dear Abhijith, 
 The calculation time of a numerical analysis depends on many factors. 
 To start with, the number of elements (nodes and stress points) has a direct impact on the calculation time, which is the reason why we strongly advise to use an efficient meshing. With efficient meshing, one can have small-sized elements in the area where large strain and stress changes (and water flow, too) is expected while maintaining large-sized elements for the rest of the model. This highly depends on the geometry drawn and usually, it requires a few iterations before one reaches the end result for the generated mesh. 
 Plasticity is another factor that can increase the calculation time, which can develop during the analysis. This depends on the constitutive model used as well as the accurate material properties added. 
 In general, predicting calculation time is far from straightforward especially with complex PLAXIS 3D numerical analyses. Surely having good computer capabilities will assist. To add to the capabilities make sure that the PLAXIS installation is running in a SSD which will significantly increase the read/write speed. 
 Having enough RAM is important. I can see that you mention having 16 GB which seems good enough for most of the 3D models. However, note that when you have models with roughly more than 1 million elements 32 GB RAM would be required.

Stefanos Papavasileiou · Answer

Dear Alexander, 
 This information is not yet exposed in the GUI, but you can find this information in the debug.dXX files, where XX is the phase number. I have added your request for future implementations.

Plaxis 3D Calculation Time

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