Hi
I modelled a circular shaft in Plaxis 3D using Mohr Coulomb solid elements since the shaft is to be an unreinforced slurry wall (hence it would not have a decent tensile capacity). I am looking for a way to extract moments and axial stresses equivalent to those i can get from a plate element. I have considered the following options:
- embedding a dummy plate with reduced stiffness. The problem of this solution is that the options available for plate elements are limited to linear elastic or elastoplastic plates (which assign equal strength in tension and compression). Using a linear elastic element or an elastoplastic element whose strength is yielded by the compressive strength will result in a behaviour where the solid element has cracked in tension while the plate element has not yielded so the extracted forces and moments will be wrong.
- modelling the shaft via a plate element but the problem again rises from the limited options for plate elements. If there was an option for an elastoplastic plate whose compressive and tensile strengths can be independently specified this would help
- manually integrating along the cross-section. This is really hard to do across the shaft. The circular geometry makes it much more complicated (and the incapability of defining cylindrical coordinate system). The cross-section feature in plaxis only averages the normal and shear stresses across the cross-section (so although i might be able to get a normal stress, getting the moments will not be possible via this feature).
Would you please help/advise?
Thank you very much!