Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
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Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
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Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#2A 45 comment thread at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480799
Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#3I started my career doing FE modeling and analysis with ANSYS and NASTRAN. Sometimes I miss these days. Thinking about how to simplify a real world problem so far that it is solvable with the computational means available was always fun. Then pushing quads around for hours until the mesh was good had an almost meditative effect. But I don't feel overwhelmingly eager to learn a new software or language.
Much to my surprise, it seems there hasn't been much movement there. ANSYS still seems to be the leader for general simulation and multi-physics. NASTRAN still popular. Still no viable open-source solution.
The only new player seems to be COMSOL. Has anyone experience with it? Would it be worth a try for someone who knows ANSYS and NASTRAN well?
Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#4I started my career doing FE modeling and analysis with ANSYS and NASTRAN. Sometimes I miss these days. Thinking about how to simplify a real world problem so far that it is solvable with the computational means available was always fun. Then pushing quads around for hours until the mesh was good had an almost meditative effect. But I don't feel overwhelmingly eager to learn a new software or language. Much to my sur…
As a recovering fe modeler, I understand completely.
Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#5I took a course in undergrad, and was exposed to it in grad school again, and for the life of me I still don't understand the derivations either Galerkin or variational.
Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#6I started my career doing FE modeling and analysis with ANSYS and NASTRAN. Sometimes I miss these days. Thinking about how to simplify a real world problem so far that it is solvable with the computational means available was always fun. Then pushing quads around for hours until the mesh was good had an almost meditative effect. But I don't feel overwhelmingly eager to learn a new software or language. Much to my sur…
> Still no viable open-source solution.
For the more low-level stuff there's the FEniCS project[1], for solving PDEs using fairly straight forward Python code like this[2]. When I say fairly straight forward, I mean it follows the math pretty closely, it's not exactly high-school level stuff.
[1]: https://fenicsproject.org/
[2]: https://jsdokken.com/dolfinx-tutorial/chapter2/linearelastic...
Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
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Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
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Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#9I started my career doing FE modeling and analysis with ANSYS and NASTRAN. Sometimes I miss these days. Thinking about how to simplify a real world problem so far that it is solvable with the computational means available was always fun. Then pushing quads around for hours until the mesh was good had an almost meditative effect. But I don't feel overwhelmingly eager to learn a new software or language. Much to my sur…
Abaqus is pretty big too. I've worked with both Ansys and Abaqus and I generally prefer the latter.
Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)
#10My hot take is that, FEM is best used as unit testing of Machine Design, not a guide towards design that it’s often used as. The greatest mechanical engineer I know, once designed an entire mechanical wrist arm with five fingers, actuations, lots of parts and flexible finger tendon. He never used FEM at any part of his design. He instead did it in the old fashioned, design and fab a simple prototype, get a feel for it, use the tolerances you discovered in the next prototype and just keep iterating quickly. If I went to him and told him to model the flexor of his fingers in FEM, and then gave him a book to tell him how to correctly use the FEM software so that you got non “non-sensical” results I would have slowed him down if anything. Just build and you learn the tolerances, and the skill is in building many cheap prototypes to get the best idea of what the final expensive build will look like.