Hi,
I am having some issues in obtaining realistic loads on Volume Elements using the Centerline tool on PLAXIS 3D.
I'm modelling a Concrete Secant Pile Wall with Steel profile in the stiffer piles. To simplify the model, I have modelled the piles as rectangular (to avoid meshing issues). For now I have modelled the Concrete as Volume Elements and the Steel Profiles as Embedded Beams inside the Volume Elements.
I'm currently modelling the Concrete as Mohr-Coulomb material (for this I've used the paper entitled "Mohr-Coulomb parameters for modelling of concrete structures", Plaxis Bulletin, Spring issue 2009).
One of the stages of my analysis includes pseudo-static loading. For that stage, I am getting reasonable ground displacements (+100mm).
However, when using the manual Centerline tool to obtain loads on the concrete, I get very high loads (Q=10e3 kN, M=10e6 kNm) in a single pile. This doesn't look right to me.
On the other hand, the loads on the Embedded Beams are really small (M=10e-6 kNm). This is true even when I use a Dummy Embedded Beam for verification.
I have tried to use the "Automatic center lines wizard" but it didn't work very well. Still, the order of the loads is much smaller and seems more realistic to me (M=10e2 kNm)
I would like to have some guidance on how to obtain loads on structural elements using the Centerline tool.
Thank you in advance.
Regards
Dear Paulo,
I have seen that you have submitted a service request about it, which we will follow up today.
In general, the Structural forces on volume piles tool highly depends on the generated mesh, as the algorithm integrates the stresses on a cross-sectional plane. So, with fewer elements in the volume pile, the quality of the results coming from this approach might be lower.
I am a bit confused about the use of embedded beams and volume elements, but we will investigate this on the service request created as it is project-specific.