Hello,
when the dreaded "Soil body seems to collapse" error comes up, at the moment the only choice one has is to go through the Output of the failed phase and inspect deformation, stress, strain plots, etc.
Sometimes (quite often in my experience) what is reported as "collapse" has got nothing to do with an actual failure mechanism, but it is rather caused by failure of the software to converge in a particular position in the mesh. It could be a single point "failing" thus stopping the software from progressing further. The user has no other choice than spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out where convergence is failing.
I know of other pieces of software that can highlight where in the mesh (nodes, or elements) convergence fails by tracing a rectangle around the affected area. The software should be able to identify where this failure occurs. Pointing the user to the location where this happens would be very, very useful and to concentrate efforts directly where they are needed.
I have been using PLAXIS for a while now and I have always been hoping this fundamental feature would be included in one of the updates but so far, no luck. I'm sure someone must have pointed this out before.
Are the developers considering the possibility of adding this feature? If not, why?