FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy

Re:FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy by lopmotr on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @05:48AM (#24905813)

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.

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Re:FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy by precsim on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @06:05AM (#24905913)

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).

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Re:FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy by unemphysbro on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @10:57AM (#24908020)

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?

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Re:FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy by lopmotr on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @01:28PM (#24909676)

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?

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Re:FEATool Multiphysics – Physics Simulation Made Easy by precsim on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @01:46PM (#24909893)

> 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.

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