Surface Spring Supports

Enter spring stiffness per unit supporting area of planar or solid elements to create elastic spring supports. Elastic Link elements may be created simultaneously. This function is mainly used to define a number of elastic supports on surfaces represented by the modulus of spring. For example, if the user wishes to define elastic supports for subgrades of foundations or underground structures, subgrade springs will be automatically entered at each node represented by concentrated stiffness. This function enables the user to specify the surface or line stiffness without having to worry about the discretization (sizes) of elements, which is automatically taken care of by the program.

From the Main Menu select Model > Boundaries > Surface Spring Supports.

Select Geometry > Boundaries > Surface Spring Supports in the Menu tab of the Tree Menu.

Click to the right of Surface Spring Supports: Display the Surface Spring Supports Table

Note
The data entered in Surface Spring Supports are converted into Point Spring Supports or Elastic Link data and saved as such.

Boundary Group Name

Select a Boundary Group in which the specified boundary condition is included. Select "Default" if Group assignment is unnecessary. Click to the right to prompt the "Define Boundary Group" dialog box to add, modify or delete Boundary Groups.

Surface Spring

Convert to Nodal Spring
Select a type of data to be created using the stiffness per unit area.

Point Spring: Point spring support

Elastic Link: Elastic link element

Distributed Spring
Enter the distributed spring stiffness to beam, planer or solid elements in order to consider elastic support conditions of subgrades.

When Point Spring is selected

When Elastic Link is selected

When Distributed Spring is selected

Note Difference between Convert to Nodal Spring and Distributed Spring