Dear support team,
I need to work out stresses at the interfaces elements in Plaxis 3D.
By looking to the Plaxis output (actually I am looking to stresses at the integration points) I see there are three components: one normal and two tangential stresses. With regards to these stresses I have the following questions:
Kind regards
Dear Vincenzo,
To answer each question:
1. The sign conversion is explained in our Reference manual. In short, compression is negative and tension is positive.
2. That seems about right. The Scientific manual, indeed, contains the relevant information.
Hi Stefanos,
I am also confused about the sign convention for interface elements. I am familiar with the sign convention section in reference manual, however, the shear stresses for interface elements are identified as tau1 and tau2. To me, tau1 should be the vertical shear stress and tau2 should be the horizontal shear stress but I saw the other way in several calculations and I am very confused.
Dear Mustafa,
Why should tau_1 be in the vertical direction? One could also draw a horizontal interface, in which case there are only horizontal shear directions....
Tau_1 s the shear stress in the "1" direction and tau_2 is the shear stress in the "2" direction. These directions can be found by showing the local axes for the interface (Options menu -> show local axies). The local axis are Red, Green and Blue, where the red axis is the "1" axis, the green axis is the "2" axis and the blue axis is the "3" axis, which is the perpendicular (normal) axis.
With kind regards,
Dennis Waterman