Z_SOIL.PC : A  Windows-Based Tool offering a unified approach to numerical simulation of soil and rock mechanics, underground structures, excavations, soil-structure interaction and underground flow
Z_SOIL.PC is a continuously upgraded geotechnical, foundation and underground flow engineering software based on the finite-element method and written in the MS-Windows environment. The program has been used with great success in forensic, analysis and design studies, covering without exception all possible scenarios encountered in real world case studies. Z_SOIL.PC is the first integrated computer code that offered a unified approach  to most of the natural processes encountered in geotechnical and foundation engineering, including stability, consolidation, creep and underground flow, excavations and soil-structure interactions.

New in Version 2009
1. Modeling large foundation rafts in 3D
- piles are modeled as beam elements discretized independently on surrounding continuum
- Mohr-Coulomb friction law is applied
- additional pile foot interface is created to model pull-out effect
- redesigning piles is very fast
- option fully automatic working both at the macro-modeling and finite element levels
2. Hardening Soil/Hardening Soil-small soil model for modeling deep excavations and soil-structure interaction problems
- small strain stiffness of soils is reporduced by HS-small version
- excessive heaving of the bottom of excavation is eliminated
- nice predictions of the influence of excavations on neigbouring structures in urban areas
3. Parametric studies enabling variation of a selected set of material properties to be varied
4. Automatic inheriting of contact strength properties from adjacent continum
5. Automatic mapping of complex geological layers defined through boreholes on 3D meshes 
6. Orthotropic elastic model for shells 
7. Directional filtering of added masses in structural dynamics
8. Wood-Armer stress resultants for plates/shells
9. Steps towards parallel computing on multi-core PC platforms
- Z_SOIL v2009 enables running larger 3D models than version v2007 (300 000 DOFS for symmetric stiffness matrices and 200 000 DOFS for nonsymmetric ones)
- Z_SOIL v2009 makes use of multicore platforms (Core Duo or Core Quad processors)