Products

Features

PLAXIS is equipped with features to deal with various aspects of complex geotechnical structures. A brief summary of the important features of the program is given below.

User friendly 3D geotechnical software

PLAXIS 3D is intended to provide a flexible 3D tool for practical analysis to be used by geotechnical engineers who are not necessarily numerical specialists. Plaxis has addressed this issue by designing robust and theoretically sound computational procedures.

• Logical geotechnical workflow
• Easy-to-use graphical user interface
• Borehole wizard for soil modelling
• Real 3D interaction

Flexible and interoperable geometry

With PLAXIS 3D arbitrary geometry of soil and structures can be defined in two different modes. These modes are specifically defined for Soil or Structural modelling. Independent solid models can automatically be intersected and meshed.

• DXF, DWG, 3DS and Terrain geometry import facilities
• Model explorer offering direct access to all objects
• Commands runner and model replay functions
• Intersect and Combine tools for complex shapes

Realistic simulation of construction stages

The Staged constructions mode enables a realistic simulation of construction and excavation processes by activating and deactivating soil volume clusters and structural objects, application of loads, changing of water tables, etc.

• Convenient and intuitive Phase explorer
• Multi object editing
• Realistic assessment of stresses and displacements
• Automatic regeneration of construction stages for geometric changes

Robust and reliable calculation kernel

The well-proven PLAXIS calculation kernel distinguishes between a Plastic calculation, a Consolidation analysis and a Phi-c reduction (safety analysis). All types of analyses can be performed with Updated Mesh to take into account large deformations.

• Well-proven and robust calculation procedures
• 64-bit Calculation kernel
• Parallelization of independent calculation phases

Comprehensive and detailed post-processing

PLAXIS Output consists of a full suite of visualization tools to check details of the complex inner structure of a full 3D underground soil-structure model.

• Contour, shading, iso-surface and vectors plots
• Movable cross-sections
• Advanced data slicing
• Extensive report and movie Generator

New and Improved features in PLAXIS 3D 2011

PLAXIS 3D 2011 contains numerous new and improved features compared to the previous version (2010.02), such as:

• Facilities for steady-state groundwater flow calculations, including flow-related material parameters, boundary conditions, drains and wells.
• Preview of results during calculation.
• Shape designer that can be used for defining shapes that contain arcs. These can be extruded or converted to planar surfaces.
• Surface contraction
• Anisotropic geotextiles
• Snap-to functionality; command override for drawing lines in a given direction up to a specific surface or volume (e.g. for drawing rock bolts or other line-type supports for surfaces)
• Support for extruding multiple objects at the same time
• Extruding surfaces that are not polygons
• Two new parallel solvers: Picos and Pardiso, in addition to the classic non-parallel solver
• Speed improvements when working with large projects (e.g. when loading projects in Input or their results in Output, and in the generation of pore pressures and fixities prior to calculations). Memory usage reduced in Output.
• Importing surfaces and volumes is now merged under one button, and added support for 3DFACE objects utilizing quads (for DXF and DWG files)
• Display of inaccurate plastic points
• Improved interactive ruler and logarithmic scaling in Output
• New commands that can be used for inspecting models and detecting problems
• New properties for geometric entities: Length, Area and Volume