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FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

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Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#11

Post by lopmotr »

precsim wrote: post #7

Don't really know how this ended up on the front page now, but the overall "idea" that I have yet to find anyone else understand and believe in (even my old prof and colleagues don't seem to "get it"), is that: wouldn't it be great if there was a unified, ideally simple, interface from which you could just select any solver by the click of a button, whether you wanted to use OpenFOAM, FEniCS, or maybe even Ansys, etc…

Is there really much value checking multiple solvers if you use the same pre-post which might introduce the same common errors, including user error, into all of them? I know it would be handy from time to time but validating solvers against each other seems like a small thing for an entire pre-post to be built around. It sounds a bit like compiling your software with multiple compilers to make sure it's correct. The bugs aren't usually in the compilers.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#12

Post by ktpsns »

Here is why the "one physics simulation should cover it all" idea will never work: The word "physics" is just too broad. Is it about particle simulation (classical N-body simulations)? Or is it about fluid simulation (classical CFD = computational fluid dynamics, or classical Navier-stokes)? Is it about a game engine, digital art or just for a fancy GUI? What about the hardware, should we use GPGPUs, distributed computing or so?

Talking about the output, what is it the user is actually interested in? Some direct simulation outcome, such as trajectories or densities, still images, time series or some derived quantities? Is the user capable of programming in some language, is interface scripting even required? Does she actually prefer a CLI?

There are a lot of different industries with different needs. For certain engineering tasks (such as aviation), there are long standing tools which work fine and people are used to. For hobbyists or the gaming industry, the same applies.

Disclaimer: I am a theoretical/computational physicist. Maybe I am too much thinking about simulating heavy ion collisions or black hole mergers, but given the physical problem you want to solve, there are quite different numerical methods applied. This applies for fundamental concepts: Besides the traditional linear algebra/partial differential equation solving, there are statistical approaches and nowadays artificial intelligence for obtaining a solution to a problem in a shorter time. The ways how to model physical reality are as diverse as the physical problems.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#13

Post by precsim »

lopmotr wrote: post #10

It's a bit unclear who the target market is. Is it scientists? It doesn't seem to be for typical engineers who have a lot of very specific needs in FEA software. I can't see much aimed at them on the website. Examples of big difficult features that are useful for engineers are robust contact, automatic contact detection, plasticity, post-buckling, geometry defeaturing, automatic midplane extraction for shells, associ…

Thanks for the honest feedback. I started building FEATool far too many years ago not getting anywhere in academia after too many postdocs, since it was the one thing I'm passionate about and good at and I felt was "missing" when I was working. But yes, it seems more and more that each user has a very specific problem that they want to solve which is very hard to generalize for. And although I still think (most if not all) software could be much more user friendly, I probably have taken on more than I can chew (I only keep going now since I feel I have no choice with the years I've already invested).

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#14

Post by precsim »

lopmotr wrote: post #11
precsim wrote: post #7

Don't really know how this ended up on the front page now, but the overall "idea" that I have yet to find anyone else understand and believe in (even my old prof and colleagues don't seem to "get it"), is that: wouldn't it be great if there was a unified, ideally simple, interface from which you could just select any solver by the click of a button, whether you wanted to use OpenFOAM, FEniCS, or maybe even Ansys, etc…

Is there really much value checking multiple solvers if you use the same pre-post which might introduce the same common errors, including user error, into all of them? I know it would be handy from time to time but validating solvers against each other seems like a small thing for an entire pre-post to be built around. It sounds a bit like compiling your software with multiple compilers to make sure it's correct. The…

I guess the thing is most people only use one solver, but at least when I was doing research it would be rare that two physics solvers based on different discretizations give exactly the same results (sometimes wildly different). So I would say, yes, its actually very valuable, although time consuming, and something most users don't really consider or think about (just because your physics solver converges doesn't necessarily mean the physics are represented accurately).

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#15

Post by regularfry »

ktpsns wrote: post #12

Here is why the "one physics simulation should cover it all" idea will never work: The word "physics" is just too broad. Is it about particle simulation (classical N-body simulations)? Or is it about fluid simulation (classical CFD = computational fluid dynamics, or classical Navier-stokes)? Is it about a game engine, digital art or just for a fancy GUI? What about the hardware, should we use GPGPUs, distributed comp…

How is "one physics simulation should cover it" relevant?

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#16

Post by fsh »

ktpsns wrote: post #12

Here is why the "one physics simulation should cover it all" idea will never work: The word "physics" is just too broad. Is it about particle simulation (classical N-body simulations)? Or is it about fluid simulation (classical CFD = computational fluid dynamics, or classical Navier-stokes)? Is it about a game engine, digital art or just for a fancy GUI? What about the hardware, should we use GPGPUs, distributed comp…

Commercial multiphysics simulators such as COMSOL are widely used in engineering and experimental physics. Of course they cannot cover all possible use cases, but they are perfectly fine for the vast majority of simulations.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#17

Post by ktpsns »

regularfry wrote: post #15
ktpsns wrote: post #12

Here is why the "one physics simulation should cover it all" idea will never work: The word "physics" is just too broad. Is it about particle simulation (classical N-body simulations)? Or is it about fluid simulation (classical CFD = computational fluid dynamics, or classical Navier-stokes)? Is it about a game engine, digital art or just for a fancy GUI? What about the hardware, should we use GPGPUs, distributed comp…

How is "one physics simulation should cover it" relevant?

This was a meta post considering a couple of posts such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24905261

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#18

Post by peterwoerner »

ktpsns wrote: post #12

Here is why the "one physics simulation should cover it all" idea will never work: The word "physics" is just too broad. Is it about particle simulation (classical N-body simulations)? Or is it about fluid simulation (classical CFD = computational fluid dynamics, or classical Navier-stokes)? Is it about a game engine, digital art or just for a fancy GUI? What about the hardware, should we use GPGPUs, distributed comp…

I mean yes, but also in mechanical engineering communities (and maybe others) we don't typical think of physics simulations in the way you do--it is well understood as a FEA tool which solves the shit we learned in undergraduate or a user provided weak form and nobody would confuse it with e.g. molecular dynamics, dft, particle dissipative dynamics.

Even though there are specialized tools, there is definitely a market for comsol like products. A problem here is they don't differentiate from comsol.

That being said, he/she/it/their would do a lot better focusing on a particular niche. For example thermal desktop is used for widely in the space industry for space simulations because it is the only off the shelf solver which does radiative heat transfer and controls well. But all the thermal analysts I know the UI is basically garbage and it solves their models way to slowly. They also have huge issues with their simulations taking for every so if you hammered on that problem for a while you would probably end up with a customer base.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#19

Post by peterwoerner »

precsim wrote: post #7

Don't really know how this ended up on the front page now, but the overall "idea" that I have yet to find anyone else understand and believe in (even my old prof and colleagues don't seem to "get it"), is that: wouldn't it be great if there was a unified, ideally simple, interface from which you could just select any solver by the click of a button, whether you wanted to use OpenFOAM, FEniCS, or maybe even Ansys, etc…

You mean like FEMAP or Hypermesh? Granted they are geared towards structural mechanics, but they will write input files for a host of solvers including ANSYS, ABAQUS, NASTRAN, MARC and LS-DYNA.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#20

Post by peterwoerner »

Couple of comments.

Seems like you are just comsol.

As someone who does this 50+ hours a week in industry (although only structural modelling but frequently coupled with optics/heat transfer/) and is reasonably well versed in the up and coming research I have a couple of questions (or would have if I was a potential buyer).

Can you mix 1D-2D-and 3D elements (I know fenics cannot). But for complex assemblies, making idealized representations is typically worthwhile (and typically necessary if anything is e.g. bolted together). Can you even mix different types of 3D elements (e.g. tets/pyramids/wedges/hexs).

The future of finite element modeling is probably is nurbs-enhanced or IGES-enhanced. Why are you building the past/current instead of the future?

Can your solvers do HP-refinement? Or even just H refinement.

Can you do glued contacts?

How much do I have to know about the time stepping scheme, or does your software work that out for you.

If I am doing thermal control or dynamic control can you handle that (I like that it interfaces with matlab so I can plug it into simulink--you should hammer on that in your copy--that is a really nice differentiating factor for people who would use FEA to drive control e.g. smart materials people, active optics, aerodynamic control people).

How easy is it to do optimizations? For instance (at home) I keep thinking about wanting to optimize a piezoelectric diagram fan like GE uses in their lights but for computers, how much easier is that going to be than just figuring out an open source software on my own.

Why FENICS and not DEAL.II or MOOSE (I don't know, I am just curious. I used to use FENICs but got frustrated because their input syntax kept changing on me.

Also really cool.

I have been thinking about writing software in this space but more nichy for about the past year and am beginning to get started, any interest in collaboration?

Also if you want to ask me questions about my thinking as a user who thinks a lot in these problems space, feel free to email me (I will want it to move to a phone call, but don't want to post my phone number on hacker news).

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