Hi everyone,

I'm trying to model a simple gravity wall. My question is: do I have to use the beam element to model the wall itself? I think it's more realistic to model the wall as an portion of the model filled with a material that resembles concrete or gambion, for instance. When I try this, however, I can't put an interface between the two materiais (soil and wall), so I can't get shear and moment values. That's my problem...

Hope you understand the question. Thank you.

Hi

one way is to use solid element to model the gravity wall and install beam elements attached to the boundary of the gravity wall. one thing you need to do is to scale down the beam's Young Modulus (i.e. E) with very small factor (to reduce the effect of stiffness on the results) then use the inverse factor to scale back the moment estimated in the beam element.

of course there is going to be error how much I do not know but this the way to get around it I've done it before.

-Roozbeh

Thank you, Roozbeh. I'll try to improve my model and i'll share it when it's complete.