At the boundaries of the calculation section, it is necessary to define the force and displacement boundary conditions for the cut-out edge areas in order to capture the influence of the external areas. As a rule, the displacement components of the edge areas are set to zero for this purpose.
The image below shows the default support conditions for the edge areas of the soil solid to be analyzed in RFEM 6. These can be flexibly edited, if necessary.
The displacement boundary conditions in the image are defined as follows:
- (1) – Base area: Fixed support with u x = u y = u z = 0
- (2) – Surface area: Free boundary surface
- (3) – Boundary surface in the xz-plane: Sliding support with u y = 0, u x ≠ 0 & u z 0
- (4) – Boundary surface in the yz-plane: Sliding support with u x = 0, u y ≠ 0 & u z 0