Introduction

The PLAXIS Input offers two ways of defining a soil/rock or structural material data set:

• Via the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
  • Via the material sets window (side tool bar icon)
  • Via the Model explorer (right-button mouse option)
• Via the command line

In this article, you can find the information about defining and editing a material data set via the PLAXIS command line which is located at the bottom of the Input program.

Command for soil/rock

To define any soil/rock material data set you need to use the soilmat command. A simple example of defining a Mohr-Coulomb material data set is shown below:

soilmat "Identification" "Sand" "SoilModel" "Mohr-Coulomb" "gammaUnsat" 17 "gammaSat" 20 "ERef" 13000 "nu" 0.3 "cRef" 1 "phi" 30

The syntax of the soilmat command is the following:

The soilmat command is followed by one (1) or more pairs of property name + value of the property.

The property name is always defined as a string (text within quotation marks) and a value of the property can be of various types (e.g., string, number, other PLAXIS object). For example, in the soil material data set above:

• Property name: "Identification"
• Property value: "Sand"
• Property name: "phi"
• Property value: 30

Command for structures

The command syntax when defining a structural material data set, such as plates, anchors, embedded beams, is the same as the one of the soil/rock material data sets.

A simple example of defining a plate material data set is shown below:

platemat "Identification" "DiaphragmWall" "MaterialType" "Elastic" "W" 10 "EA1" 7500000 "EI" 1000000

Editing a material set

To edit a material set via the command line you can use either of the following two commands:

• set
• setproperties

The set command allows changing the property value of a single property, while the setproperties allows changing multiple property values at the same time.

 A few examples are shown below:

• Changing the friction angle of the Sand soil material:

set Sand.phi 28

• Changing both the Young’s Modulus and the saturated unit weight:

setproperties Sand "gammaSat" 19 "ERef" 12500.0

• Changing the weight of the DiaphragmWall plate material:

set DiaphragmWall.W 12.5

• Changing the weight, the EA1 and Poisson’s ratio (StructNu):

setproperties DiaphragmWall "W" 12.5 "EA1" 7000000.0 "StructNu" 0.2