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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)

#31

Post by ccosm »

angry_moose wrote: post #15

I've been a full-time FEM Analyst for 15 years now. It's generally a nice article, though in my opinion paints a far rosier picture of the last couple decades than is warranted. Actual, practical use of FEM has been stagnate for quite some time. There have been some nice stability improvements to the numerical algorithms that make highly nonlinear problems a little easier; solvers are more optimized; and hardware is…

>Basically every advanced/"next generation" thing the article touts has fallen flat on its face when applied to real problems

Even Arnold's work? FEEC seemed quite promising last time I was reading about it, but never seemed to get much traction in the wider FEM world.

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#32

Post by petters »

littlestymaar wrote: post #27
weinzierl wrote: post #3

I 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…

> The only new player seems to be COMSOL Ouch. I kind of know Comsol because it was already taught in my engineering school 15 years ago, so that it still counts as a “new entrant” really gives an idea of how slow the field evolves.

The COMSOL company was started in 1986....

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#34

Post by niraj-agarwal »

Predicting how things evolve in space-time is a fundamental need. Finite element methods deserve the glory of a place at the top of the HN list. I opted for "orthogonal collocation" as the method of choice for my model back in the day because it was faster and more fitting to the problem at hand. A couple of my fellow researchers did use FEM. It was all the rage in the 90s for sure.

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#35

Post by fn-mote »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #19
magicalhippo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Interesting. Please bear with me as this is going off 25 year old memories, but my memory is that the workflow for using FEA tools was: Model in some 3D modelling engineering tool (e.g. SolidWorks), ansys to run FEA, iterate if needed, prototype, iterate. So to have anything useful, you need that entire pipeline? For hobbyists, I assume we need this stack. What are the popular modelling tools?

> For hobbyists, I assume we need this stack.

Just curious what kind of hobby leads to a finite element analysis?

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#36

Post by neumann »

akomtu wrote: post #26
angry_moose wrote: post #15

I've been a full-time FEM Analyst for 15 years now. It's generally a nice article, though in my opinion paints a far rosier picture of the last couple decades than is warranted. Actual, practical use of FEM has been stagnate for quite some time. There have been some nice stability improvements to the numerical algorithms that make highly nonlinear problems a little easier; solvers are more optimized; and hardware is…

Could you write a blogpost-style article on how to model the shallow water wave equation on a sphere? The article would start with the simplest possible method, something that could be implemented in short C program, and would continue with a progressively more accurate and complex methods.

If you are interested in this, I'd recommend following an openfoam tutorial, c++ though.

You could do SWE with finite elements, but generally finite volumes would be your choice to handle any potential discontinuities and is more stable and accurate for practical problems.

Here is a tutorial. https://www.tfd.chalmers.se/~hani/kurser/OS_CFD_2010/johanPi...

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#37

Post by tightbookkeeper »

antegamisou wrote: post #22
sashank_1509 wrote: post #10

My 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 i…

Good luck designing crash resilient structures without simulating it on FEM based software though.

They did this just fine until without such tools for the majority of innovation in the last century.

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#38

Post by master_crab »

weinzierl wrote: post #3

I 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.

Wait? What? NASTRAN was originally developed by NASA and open sourced over two decades ago. Is this commercial software built on top that is closed source?

I’m astonished ANSYS and NASTRAN are still the only players in town. I remember using NASTRAN 20 years ago for FE of structures while doing aero engineering. And even then NASTRAN was almost 40 years old and ancient.

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#39

Post by bauta-steen »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #19
magicalhippo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Interesting. Please bear with me as this is going off 25 year old memories, but my memory is that the workflow for using FEA tools was: Model in some 3D modelling engineering tool (e.g. SolidWorks), ansys to run FEA, iterate if needed, prototype, iterate. So to have anything useful, you need that entire pipeline? For hobbyists, I assume we need this stack. What are the popular modelling tools?

To get started with Fenics you can maybe use the FEATool GUI, which makes it easier to set up FEA models, and also export Python simulation scripts to learn or modify the Fenics syntax [1].

[1]: https://www.featool.com/tutorial/2017/06/16/Python-Multiphys...

Re: Eighty Years of the Finite Element Method (2022)

#40

Post by sashank_1509 »

antegamisou wrote: post #22
sashank_1509 wrote: post #10

My 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 i…

Good luck designing crash resilient structures without simulating it on FEM based software though.

I’d guess most of the bridges in US were built before FEM existed
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