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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)

#51

Post by jasomill »

fn-mote wrote: post #35
lll-o-lll wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMO, the mathematics underlying finite element methods and related subjects — finite element exterior calculus comes immediately to mind — are interesting enough to constitute a hobby in their own right.

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

#52

Post by antononcube »

During my industrial PhD, I created an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) framework for Large Scale Air-Pollution (LSAP) simulations.

The OOP framework I created was based on Petrov-Galerkin FEM. (Both proper 2D and "layered" 3D.)

Before my PhD work, the people I worked with (worked for) used spectral methods and Alternate-direction FEM (i.e. using 1D to approximate 2D.)

In some conferences and interviews certain scientists would tell me that programming FEM is easy (for LSAP.) I always kind of agree and ask how many times they have done it. (For LSAP or anything else.) I was not getting an answer from those scientists...

Applying FEM to real-life problems can involve the resolving of quite a lot of "little" practical and theoretical gotchas, bugs, etc.

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

#53

Post by digdugdirk »

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…

I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've been wanting to better understand the computational side of the tools I use every day. Do you have any recommendations for learning resources if one wanted to "relearn" FEA from a computer science perspective?

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

#55

Post by gwern »

fastasucan wrote: post #47
akomtu wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting that this reads almost like an chatgpt prompt.

Lazy people have been lazy forever. I stumbled across an example of this the other day from the 1990s, I think, and was shocked how much the student emails sounded like LLM prompts: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/questions....

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

#56

Post by nativeit »

kragen wrote: post #49
fn-mote wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For hobbyists, I assume we need this stack. Just curious what kind of hobby leads to a finite element analysis?

Electronics (when you start to care about EMI or antenna design), model airplanes (for aerodynamics), rocketry, machining (especially if you want to get into SPIF), robotics, 3-D printing (especially for topology optimization), basically anything that deals with designing solid structures in the physical world. Also, computer graphics, including video games. Unfortunately the barrier to entry is too high for most hob…

There are some obvious downsides and exceptions to this sentiment, but on balance, I really appreciate how the expansive access to information via the internet has fostered this phenomenon: where an unremarkable fella with a dusty media studies degree, a well-equipped garage, and probably too much free time can engineer and construct robotic machines, implement/tweak machine vision mechanisms, microwave radio transceivers, nanometer-scale measurements using laser diodes and optical interferometry, deep-sky astrophotography, etc., etc.. Of course, with burgeoning curiosity and expanding access to surplus university science lab equipment, comes armchair experts and the potential for insufferability[0]. It’s crucial to maintain perspective and be mindful of just how little any one person (especially a person with a media studies degree) can possibly know.

[0] I’m pretty sure “insufferability” isn’t a real word. [Edit: don’t use an asterisk for footnotes.]

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

#57

Post by antegamisou »

tightbookkeeper wrote: post #37
antegamisou wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except that everything's gotten abysmally complex. Vehicle crash test experiments are a good example of validating the FEM simulation (yes that's the correct order, not vice versa)

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

#58

Post by MichaelZuo »

gwern wrote: post #55
fastasucan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that this reads almost like an chatgpt prompt.

Lazy people have been lazy forever. I stumbled across an example of this the other day from the 1990s, I think, and was shocked how much the student emails sounded like LLM prompts: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~martinh/poems/questions....

It reminds me of the old joke that half of the students are below average…

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

#59

Post by MengerSponge »

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…

Once you have a mesh that's "good enough", you can use any number of numeric solvers. COMSOL has a very good mesher, and a competent geometry editor. It's scriptable, and their solvers are also very good.

There might be better programs for some problems, but COMSOL is quite nice.

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

#60

Post by tightbookkeeper »

antegamisou wrote: post #57
tightbookkeeper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except that everything's gotten abysmally complex. Vehicle crash test experiments are a good example of validating the FEM simulation (yes that's the correct order, not vice versa)

How can you assert so confidently you know the cause and effect?

Certainly computers allow more complexity, so there is interplay between what it enables and what’s driven by good engineering.

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