Soil materials, as well as plate materials are sometimes used in more than one Plaxis project file, for instance, when analysing alternatives or for models located close to each other. In Plaxis software the global material database can be used as a repository of material data sets. Then, these material data sets can be used for new projects.
The procedure described below covers the following topics:
Note that the global material database can be created and used to add material data sets, such as for soils and interfaces, plates, embedded beam rows (or embedded beams in 3D), geogrids, beams (only in 3D) and anchors.
The steps to change the global material database are explained in detail below:
Sometimes there is no existing global material database or a new one is required. The steps to create a new global material database are explained in detail below:
The steps to add existing materials to this global material database are:
For a new project, you can now select the new global database and copy any of the global material data sets in the project material database.
An example of a Global material database can be seen below:
Note that using any material database, which is included in a project folder (data.plxmat) as a global material database should be avoided: unexpected behaviour might be noticed (e.g. material assignments might be lost in the original project). Instead, the materials used in this specific project can be copied to a global material database (*.matdb-file), following the steps mentioned above.