In the meantime, the other group of people, researchers and developers of the finite element method, would love to have access to well-established reliable source code, which can be used as foundation and building blocks in their development of new algorithms for problems that were never solved before. Only the commercial finite element programs, such as ABAQUS, will satisfy their need. They require highly robust, well documented, fully verified codes with good technical support to solve their problems, but they are not interested in how the computations are actually carried out. One groups are users (or analysts) of the finite element method or finite element programs. There are two different groups of people in the finite element community. I fully agree to many of the comments posted there. I just had a very quick look at it this morning, and found it contained all kinds of interesting information, that I didn't know before. Zhigang: Many thanks for recommending this web site to me. Even the basic question as to what language it should be written in could be controversial. One reason, in my opinion, that there is not a more active open-source finite element project is that it would be very difficult to get even a small portion of the computational mechanics community to agree on the ground rules. I'm sure that Bob also incorporates changes or subroutines that have been suggested or sent to him by developers. One can usually port over the changes you've made from one release to another, provided you haven't done anything too drastic to the basic structure of the code. I think the entire project is very informal in comparison to Firefox.įEAP is pretty modular. However, I don't believe this is Bob Taylor's objective. There are many people who use FEAP to do analysis work. Some of them exchange information and fragments of code with one another, others only do so with Bob Taylor. I wouldn't necessarily call them a community in the sense that iMechanica represents a community. There's definitely a group of people who work on FEAP routinely. It is designed for researchers who, at one time or another, probably wrote a small finite element code themselves. Much of the heart of the code is transparent, the element routines are relatively easy to understand, and for the most part it is efficient. It is almost impossible to investigate such questions without being able to directly modify any part of the code (and not just one subroutine).įEAP is an excellent code for developers. fluid-structure interaction or force balance/mass transfer). ![]() Another issue for development concerns solution strategies for strongly coupled field phenomena (e.g. For example, what is the best way to treat fourth-order problems on arbitrary domains? For a variety of reasons, the classical FEM is not very good at this. ![]() Finite element developers focus on the technical challenges of the method. It provides a reasonable user-interface, access to *some* subroutines, and technical support is readily available.ĭevelopers, on the other hand, are concerned with the development of numerical methods themselves. However, analysts are rarely interested in modifying the details of the code itself.įor analysts, ABAQUS is a great code. An analyst might be interested in, for example, studying the deflection of a composite beam or the buckling of a thin film. Here, I define an analyst as someone who views the FEM as primarily a tool, something like a fairly sophisticated calculator. ![]() In the world of researchers working with finite elements and the finite element method, there exist both analysts and developers. We use FEAP quite a bit here in the Computational Mechanics Laboratory at Duke University, and have also used ABAQUS in the past.
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