I am not clear on what you want to do. A finite element program needs a mesh. How do you want to describe it? A thickness is not sufficient.
Hi Prof. Taylor,
Thanks for the concerns.
The attached is an example of a "user oriented" input.txt I intend to create for pavement structure analysis. In this file, the users are required to input:
1. Pavement layers, e.g. how many Asphalt Concrete lifts, how many layers in total;
2. The thickness of each layer;
3. The modulus of each layer; if 1. is entered, it represents the material is nonlinear and a Umat would be called (I already have the Umat file)
4. Possion's ratio of each layer;
5. Load: including load pressure, load area and time increment (transient static analysis)
This input file would be fed to FEAP/FEAPpv, which is supposed to create mesh files, call Umat if nonlinear material is identified, conduct the following FE analysis and output the results(displacement, stress)
The benefits are:1) The program can be shared to other people who needs to do FEM analysis but without solid FEM knowledge or FEAP experience; 2) what't more, this kind of input is a lot more efficient, especially when a bunch of analysis are to be done.
Thanks much.