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FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

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Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#21

Post by unemphysbro »

precsim wrote: post #13
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 no…

Really cool project. I've used comsol in the past for some fluidics simulations. I agree, the open source multiphysics packages come with a steep learning curve (easier for the more tech literate).

How did you get out of the post-doc loop?

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#22

Post by [deleted] »

unemphysbro wrote: post #21
precsim wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Really cool project. I've used comsol in the past for some fluidics simulations. I agree, the open source multiphysics packages come with a steep learning curve (easier for the more tech literate). How did you get out of the post-doc loop?

[deleted]

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#23

Post by phkahler »

peterwoerner wrote: post #20

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 i…

In the commercial space I always refer people to https://www.altair.com/inspire/ Which now uses SomSolid for analysis. From what I've heard (used to work there, still know people) it is way ahead of other FEA solvers. You can also find easy access to 3rd party tools through Altairs licensing model.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#24

Post by precsim »

peterwoerner wrote: post #20

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 i…

> Seems like you are just comsol.

Maybe it isn't too clear, but Comsol is just one solver (depending how to look at it I guess), while the idea of FEATool is to be a fully integrated platform for "any" solver, and in the extension to be able to mix and match and combine them (plug and play so to speak). At present I have just been able to implement the built-in MATLAB based multiphysics solver, with interfaces to FEniCS, OpenFOAM, and SU2.

> 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.

No particular reason really, I just started with FEniCS as it is quite popular and I found the FEATool PDE syntax easy to convert to FEniCS Python scripts. The plan is to add more and more external solver options.

> 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).

Thank you, I really appreciate the interest and feedback. Unfortunately its kind of "not implemented/available yet" to all your technical questions, although FEATool technically can solve any system of PDEs, I haven't yet pre-defined and set up everything so it is easy for the end users. So as many things are possible to do by going down to the FEM matrix assembly syntax but from a users standpoint that is most often the same as it doesn't exist.

> 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?

Thanks again for the feedback, I'm certainly open to all and any collaborations (email in my profile). Yes, looking back I think starting in a niche would have been a better approach.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#25

Post by peterwoerner »

phkahler wrote: post #23
peterwoerner wrote: post #20

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 i…

In the commercial space I always refer people to https://www.altair.com/inspire/ Which now uses SomSolid for analysis. From what I've heard (used to work there, still know people) it is way ahead of other FEA solvers. You can also find easy access to 3rd party tools through Altairs licensing model.

Yea, from the conversations I have had with the guys over at hypermesh, their tools are way more developed than the stuff MSC and Siemens put out. I am not well versed in the ANSYS or Abaqus.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#26

Post by lopmotr »

precsim wrote: post #13
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 no…

I can understand that, having experienced something similar myself. The problem with users wanting things is they're often things that aren't really compatible with your vision, so you have to compromise and eventually, if you "succeed", you end up being a giant mess that everybody complains about like ANSYS.

Supporting multiple solvers is surely going to mean having solver-specific features, isn't it? Which would eat away at what seems like your vision. Or are you able to keep it abstracted from that so they really are interchangeable?

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#27

Post by precsim »

lopmotr wrote: post #26
precsim wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

I can understand that, having experienced something similar myself. The problem with users wanting things is they're often things that aren't really compatible with your vision, so you have to compromise and eventually, if you "succeed", you end up being a giant mess that everybody complains about like ANSYS. Supporting multiple solvers is surely going to mean having solver-specific features, isn't it? Which would ea…

> I can understand that, having experienced something similar myself. The problem with users wanting things is they're often things that aren't really compatible with your vision, so you have to compromise and eventually, if you "succeed", you end up being a giant mess that everybody complains about like ANSYS.

Yes, unfortunately that is exactly right as I already am getting the heat. No matter what is wrong Matlab, meshing, OpenFOAM, FEniCS etc it always comes back to me even if its from an external solver or component, leading to lots of support. So yeah, I know many things could be much better and I'm far from what my "vision" is, but I don't have such resources so I have to try to do the best I can.

> Supporting multiple solvers is surely going to mean having solver-specific features, isn't it? Which would eat away at what seems like your vision. Or are you able to keep it abstracted from that so they really are interchangeable?

I have so far kept it abstracted with a minimum set of features, but some solvers only support some physics, models, or features so as you allude to sooner or later it will begin to become specialized modes or so for each solver, which is not ideal and I'm not yet sure the best way to move forward.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#28

Post by precsim »

peterwoerner wrote: post #20

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 i…

> 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).

Thank you for your offer, I could not find you contact info anywhere though, so I left my contact in my profile if anyone wants to get in touch for collaborations or anything at all really.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#29

Post by peterwoerner »

precsim wrote: post #24
peterwoerner wrote: post #20

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 i…

> Seems like you are just comsol. Maybe it isn't too clear, but Comsol is just one solver (depending how to look at it I guess), while the idea of FEATool is to be a fully integrated platform for "any" solver, and in the extension to be able to mix and match and combine them (plug and play so to speak). At present I have just been able to implement the built-in MATLAB based multiphysics solver, with interfaces to FEn…

I am sceptical that you are going to find customers who are going to pay for using multiple solvers especially since they use the fortran routines on the back end and most fea solvers have been heavily verified by e.g. nafems. That said it might be a defining feature between choosing COMSOL vs. FEATool Multiphysics but I doubt it is a technical driver.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#30

Post by aryoung5 »

zokier wrote: post #6

Physics simulation is imho one of the things that feel like they should be easy but in reality is really difficult. And not talking about anything super fancy, just basic classical mechanics. One of my dream projects would be to glue physics engine like Project Chrono[1] with modeling kernel like Open CASCADE[2], and some (FOSS) CAD (solvespace[3]?) to make an user friendly package to be able to setup simple scenes f…

Hey, you can actually use Open Cascade with ProjectChrono right now: http://api.projectchrono.org/group__cascade__module.html. There are also some nice tutorials (http://api.projectchrono.org/tutorial_demo_robot.html). A Solidworks add-in was also made: http://api.projectchrono.org/tutorial_table_of_content_chron....

I've only used Chrono::Sensor, Chrono::Vehicle, PyChrono and I work on a new module called SynChrono. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

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