Please note that the coordinate and dimension of your surface topography will show up in FLAC 3D as it is defined in SketchUp. Figure 1 shown below presents the surface topography modified using “Smoove” tools. This radius represents the distance of your influenced area when you are changing the topography of your surface. After the flat surface have been created, select the “Smoove” from sandbox and define the radius of the smoove. In sandbox dialog box, click “From Scratch” - define your grid spacing – define the length and width of your desired surface.ģ. Open SketchUp Make 2017 and enable Sandbox featureįor you who does not have sandbox feature available, you can download it from Windows//Extension Warehouse.Ģ. This process can be done using SketchUp Make and sandbox tools within a few steps as shown in the following points:ġ. In a condition where we don’t have the contour line from the project manager or client, sometimes we need to approximate the shape of our surface topography that will eventually define our mesh in FLAC 3D.
Flac3d shapes how to#
This article particularly will cover how the topography can be created from scratch and also from a contour line using SketchUp and how to import it in FLAC 3D. Second, after the surface have been successfully created, we can import it to FLAC 3D using geometry import command and our mesh will be ready for analysis. stl format needs to be created in SkecthUp using sandbox feature. In general, there are two steps required in completing this exercise.
![flac3d shapes flac3d shapes](https://itasca-int.objects.frb.io/assets/img/site/software/flac3d/FLAC3D_600_Slide_10b.png)
The FLAC 3D demo version is available in Itasca website.
Flac3d shapes install#
If you want to try the following steps by yourself, please install SketchUp Make 2017 in the following link.
Flac3d shapes software#
More importantly, this software is also loaded with many powerful yet easy to use features such as the sandbox tool that I will briefly explain below. I choose SketchUp Make as this versatile software is made free for everyone by Google. In this short article, I want to share a few steps that we can follow to generate a three dimensional topography in FLAC 3D v5 using SketchUp Make 2017. However, the formulation of finite difference implemented in FLAC 3D is a huge advantage of this software in analyzing dynamic problem in geotechnical engineering, for instance, the problem of earthquake induced ground failure where high degree of non-linearity is expected. In these versions, the mesh can be only generated through lines of code that might reach up to hundreds for a complex geometry. For most of you who have been working with FLAC 3D, you might know sometimes it can be cumbersome to create the mesh especially in FLAC 3D v5 and its predecessor.
![flac3d shapes flac3d shapes](https://softsoldier.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Itasca-FLAC3D-5.0-5.jpg)
Many geotechnical software such as FLAC 3D, PLAXIS 3D, SoilVison have provided some features to generate and analyze a three dimensional mesh topography. With advance in computing power and ability, in recent years, we have seen more often slope stability analyses conducted in three dimensional frameworks.