ANSYS workbench: Analysing soil-structure interaction in Workbench 1

[tomdeturck]

For my master thesis in constructional engineering, I'm trying to construct a model of a out of plane historical tower along with it's foundation and the underlying soil. This includes:

- 3D solid model of the tower (made out of different 3D solids imported as .sat's) analysed with "static structural" analysis system
- underlying foundation (3D solid imported as .sat )
- Surrounding soil made out of different layers


The tower itself isn't that big of a problem.
However, I have no idea how to make soil-structure analysis's or how to even correctly define the soil in in Ansys or Ansys workbench.

Any help?

 

[Stanum]

You should probably look into extended drucker prager material model for soil behaiviour. Interaction can be probably realised by frictional contact. The boundary conditions on the soil will depend on the analysis you want to perform, generally you just want to constrain the expansion or limit it to predefined values. Variation of soil properties along the depth can be acheived by creating a temperature dependant low, that will govern the change and addition of temperature as initial condition (no temperature expansion coefficient have to be set then).

 

[tomdeturck]

Any idea if this is at all possible in Workbench? On another forum (i've posted on like 4. Yeah i'm desperate..) someone said that i propably had to use MAPDL but I have zero experience in that. All the things I have done (and my professor) has worked with is Ansys Workbench. And even then, our experience is limited.

Also does the drucker prager model take into account the consolidation of the soil over time?

Thank you for your help

 

[Stanum]

DP model I suppose it does not. To conduct something like this you will probably have to combine other models, you probably should check furs on model, but I have my doubts on it.
I suppose that you can do it in workbench, but you will still need to use command snippets to include more complex behavior into your model. Search for ansys best of the best worlds for more information.
This is a complex task. I have only observed succesfull results made in MAPDL.
If you can read in Russian I can recommend you Ansys section on forum.dwg.ru, there some pieces of advice there that can help you.
As far as I know material library of ansys that can be applied for soils is extremely limited, and a lot of users prefer Abaqus for this purposes.
I am not sure about this but for consolidation you can try to implement creep model, or maybe develop a table for material parameters that will depend on the time value.