FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy • Hacker News Board

The first versions were open source asking for funding by donations. Although I would have really liked for FEATool to be open source (and I think such as tool would be ideally suited as such), unfortunately not having any form of funding but my personal savings, it was needless to say financially unsustainable (not to say that actually its financially much easier now).

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#5

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

caturopath wrote: post #3

heisenzombie wrote: post #2

Is this trying to be an open source COMSOL?

Looks like it's not open source http://forum.featool.com/Queries-about-software-license-td20... They mention using some open source solvers, so in that sense you could say that the open source COSMOL was already sitting around :)

[deleted]

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#6

Post by zokier » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:55 AM UTC

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 for simulation.

[1] https://projectchrono.org/

[2] http://www.opencascade.com/content/open-source-core-technolo...

[3] http://solvespace.com/index.pl

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#7

Post by precsim » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:21 AM UTC

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. Then you could set up your simulation model once, and run it on "any" and many solvers (to validate and check results etc.). So that's what I've been trying to do by myself for the past 7 years or so. For better or worse it initially seemed like a good idea to use Matlab/Octave, but have been planning to eventually move either to Python or Pascal/Delphi backend.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#8

Post by JorgeGT » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:24 AM UTC

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…

I agree, in my lab our typical solution is a MATLAB/Python routine managing the simulations (submitting to a cluster, gathering the results, producing a report via LaTeX, changing some parameters, submitting again...) but these routines needs to be heavily customized for each project, version of the software, cluster, etc. and they always end being very fragile.

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#9

Post by precsim » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:35 AM UTC

JorgeGT wrote: post #8

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…

I agree, in my lab our typical solution is a MATLAB/Python routine managing the simulations (submitting to a cluster, gathering the results, producing a report via LaTeX, changing some parameters, submitting again...) but these routines needs to be heavily customized for each project, version of the software, cluster, etc. and they always end being very fragile.

Yes, I think the initial simulation definition/set up can be "easy", but once you get to parallel shared memory clusters it unfortunately have to be much more hands on. I had hoped to eventually not only allow running individual solvers from a single interface, but also allow coupling them similar to PreCICE [1], however making that easy to use is something I've not dared attempt yet.

[1]: https://www.precice.org

Re: FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

#10

Post by lopmotr » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

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, associativity with CAD models, being Ansys or Abaqus (because everyone knows and trusts them), not having to write scripts, not having to convert imperial units to a coherent system, not having to learn a huge complex pile of software (some tension with all the other requirements!), etc.

Easy to use FEA is a seemingly impossible goal because of the huge range of features that some users want and other users don't want as well as the fact that it has to combine a lot of concepts just don't seem to naturally fit well into any simple organizing principle for the user. Then there's the zillions of man-hours to do it all.