Sometimes it is needed to change the local axes for a plate/geogrid elements. Unfortunately, when changing this setting to Manual in the Model Explorer or Selection Explorer, the axis direction is not updated:
This becomes a problem for the calculation and interpretation of forces for imported curved surfaces: each surface is currently built up from (internally defined) triangles. Non-flat surfaces will contain triangles with different local axis directions, e.g. in the case of curved surfaces or imported surfaces.When importing a surface, there is no information available what the axis-1 direction should be, and because of this Plaxis will assume a direction based on the local orientation of each individual (internal) triangle, which means that for imported surfaces the orientation of the local axis could be in any direction. Since there is no way to overwrite this local axis for the surface, the results will be hard to interpret: the force N1 for one part of the surface will have a different orientation for the force N1 in the next part.
This is solved since PLAXIS 3D2012.02
Workarounds available in PLAXIOS 3D2012.01:
In order to change/update the local axes, the following work-around should be used:
When having this issue with decomposed cylinders, it can also be overcome by creating the surface of the cylinder using the extrude functionality: