Normally, when you want to have an item activated you need to activate the checkmark in front of the item and set the values accordingly.However, for the volume strain settings in PLAXIS 2D AE, PLAXIS 2D 2015.00 and PLAXIS 2D 2015.01 this does not always work as expected: whenever a value is set for one of the volume strain components (εxx, εyy, εzz and εvol), this will be applied in the calculation, independent of the activation state. This happens even if the volume strain components are not visible when the Apply checkbox is unchecked.
This issue is already solved since PLAXIS 2D 2015.02
When using an older version, you can manually check the behaviour of the volume strain settings by using the tabulate command to see if in any of the phases the volume strain values are not equal to zero:tabulate Soils "VolumeStrain.epsvol"
With this, you could encounter a reply like this:
0091> tabulate Soils "VolumeStrain.epsvol" ObjectVolumeStrain.epsvol Soil_1_Soil_2_1 InitialPhase: 0 Phase_1: 0 Phase_2: 0 Phase_3: 0 Phase_4: 1 Phase_5: 1 Phase_6: 1 Soil_1_1 InitialPhase: 0 Phase_1: 0 Phase_2: 0 Phase_3: 0 Phase_4: 0 Phase_5: 0 Phase_6: 0
Here we can see that for the Soil object Soil_1_Soil_2_1 that the volume strain is set to 1 in Phases 4, 5 and 6. Now to conclude if the value is activated correctly, we should check the volume strain settings for this soil object in the selection explorer, see the examples below.
In these examples we see:
To summarize the behaviour:
In order to not have a volume strain applied in PLAXIS 2D 2015.01 and earlier, please manually set the values for the strain to zero for the individual clusters. To do so: