Problem description

When using a Strong Motion CDROM (SMC) file as input for a dynamic multiplier, the first line of data for the accelerations is skipped when reading in the acceleration values.

Solution

Skipping the first data line from the SMC file is solved since PLAXIS 3D 2013.00

To still use the first line of data from this SMC file in older versions, the first line of acceleration data should be duplicated.

This line can be found after the comments section. The first 27 lines (11 text-header lines, 6 lines of integer headers and 10 lines of real headers) are headers, followed by a comment section. These comments usually start with ‘|’. Then the first line of data, containing the acceleration data (eight values on each line), should be duplicated by copy+paste the line by inserting it as the second line and then save the file.

In order to check if the file is correctly imported, check if the first value for the SMC acceleration data also is the first value in the imported table. In the example above (taken from 225a.smc) the first data line in the imported table should have a value that corresponds with the first value in the SMC file: -3.1556E+0 [cm/s2].

Note that the SMC-file values will be converted from [cm/s2] to the Plaxis file’s project units.