I have a cooling tower support and integral sump tank I'm designing in RAM Elements.
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I have meshed the walls at 1 foot horizontal increments so that I can do a triangular load distribution (for external soil, and internal water pressure).
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I have meshed the bottom slab of the tank on a 1 foot grid to place a spring at each node based on a 1 foot trib of the subgrade modulus (i.e. 115 pci * 12in*12in = 16.6 k/in in the middle, less on the edges and corners).
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How should I best get soil pressures from this model? It appears that the intermediate nodes in the finite element model are also picking up load, so that the reaction at each corner is not the true soil pressure.
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Thanks.
I've also uploaded my model to the secure upload site as Cooling_Tower_and_Sump_tdl.etz
