I read the manual on estimating the normal and shear stiffnesses for liners. From the formula stated in Equation 1 (Liner Structural Element 3D), how to calculate/measure the smallest dimension in the adjoining zone is not clear. I even tried to back-calculate the smallest dimension (estimated as 0.0633) of the model in the manual (embedded retaining wall) see attached but I still could not figure out where they measured the value. Please I would appreciate how I could estimate the smallest dimension of an adjoining zone in the normal direction.
In this model, delta_Z_min is 1.0 from the command zone create brick size 11,1,11.
For other cases,
You can manually measure the distance between two points in a likely zone in the grid plot by clicking the measurement button.
You can query a likely zone to obtain its volume, then estimate its size by taking the cube root of this volume.
You can also write a FISH function to loop through all zones adjacent to the liner to estimate the minimum size.
Also, remember there is a factor of 10 in the recommendation. In this example, the optimal Kn (Ks) would be around 10×6.33e9/1.0 = 6.33e10, and a slightly higher value 1e11 is used.
