Refer Intro to geotechinical engineering handbook...It will be helpful for u

You can model the direct shear test by DEM or FEM. Here, I can refer you a paper based on FEM to model the direct shear test. Although the software used in this paper was different from the software you mentioned, but the formation of model geometry, soil-box interface, boundary condition, etc. will be similar. Thus, it will be helpful.

The link is: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/56f4/22f03fca14ea20002a797c4f52a1f5123f48.pdf

Dear Sadiq Shamsher,

You can go with several program to deal with this problem, actually. If you want to go through it with PLAXIS, it is straight forward by just applying one cyclic loading on the top of soil column. The bottom boundary should be fixed and lateral one can be free. If you want to consider the real stress state of that soil at field though, you should add the confining pressures at lateral boundaries. I highly recommend you use the Ramberg-Osgood model for soil in PLAXIS.

The most important point i would like to notice you that the soil’s self-weight multiplier must set to almost zero (0.000 somthing) to prevent some problems relating to dynamic effects and initial stresses, which can affect to your final results.

Regards,

It simple to simulate as long as you master the boundary conditions!

This link is hopefully useful:

https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:c320f947-6a68-4e8b-830a-b94b88d3e43f/datastream/OBJ/download

Hi all..i am also modelling the direct shear test through abaqus model...can somebody help me out through the paper which i can follow..thank you!