New in PLAXIS 2D CONNECT Edition V22 Update 2
Cable bolt element
Added cable bolt element and material type to simulate rock reinforcement like grouted cables or frictional/grouted bolts that work mostly in tension/compression. Material definition includes input of bond stiffness and bond strength parameters in line with rock engineering practice. Other capabilities include confining stress dependency and pre-stressing of the element.
Hoek-Brown model improvements
Added tension cut-off and tensile strength parameters to the material parameter input. Safety calculations for Hoek-Brown materials now correctly reduce the tensile strength as well, providing more realistic safety factors.
Simplification of polylines and polygons
Exported CAD files can contain many less relevant intermediate points and lines. Once imported into PLAXIS 2D, these dense geometries will result in overly fine meshes and will slow down. During the import of, for example, geological cross-sections coming from Leapfrog or CAD applications, users can now select the "reduce point density" option to reduce the number of points of polygons or polylines present in the imported file. By reducing the number of points during the import process, the user can optimize the imported geometry for numerical analysis.
Free field boundary improvements
The free field boundaries implementation has been updated for this release offering several improvements. Deformation patterns, particularly along the boundaries, are now consistent with those expected in a far field analysis and there is no longer a need to include drained material columns at the model boundaries when performing an undrained or a partially undrained analysis. Several validation exercises were developed to ensure that the response when using free field BCs is consistent with what is expected from theory of wave propagation, as well as obtained when using other BCs (e.g. tied degrees of freedom).