FEM SolverElmer

Description
Elmer is an open source multiphysical simulation software mainly developed by CSC - IT Center for Science (CSC). Elmer development was started 1995 in collaboration with Finnish Universities, research institutes and industry. After it's open source publication in 2005, the use and development of Elmer has become international.

Elmer includes physical models of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, heat transfer and acoustics, for example. These are described by partial differential equations which Elmer solves by the Finite Element Method (FEM).

Creating the SolverElmer object in the Analysis container in FreeCAD, gives access to the Elmer Equations for simple or multiphysical analysis.

Since FreeCAD already has an extensive integration of Calculix and  Z88 as solvers for mechanical and thermo-mechanical analysis, Elmer will be preferred for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), heat, electrostatics and electrodynamics. It can also be used for mechanical FEA through the Elasticity equation or any combination of the aforementioned equations. This combination makes Elmer the preferred choice for multi-physics analyses.

Installation
Elmer requires two components to be interfaced with FreeCAD: There are standalone programs for both of these applications but their installation and usage are beyond the scope of the FreeCAD integration.
 * ElmerGrid is the interface handling meshes
 * ElmerSolver is handling the computation.


 * 1) Download and install the version best suited to your Operating System (Windows or Linux). It is recommended to install the  version to get multi-core support.
 * 2) In FreeCAD go to
 * 3) In the FEM preferences set the correct path for both  and, or : set the path for  instead of  to make Elmer use all available CPU cores.
 * [[Image:Preferences-ElmerPath.png|Elmer Tab in FEM Preferences]]

You are ready to use Elmer in FreeCAD.


 * Now start FreeCAD and change the units scheme to MKS in the preferences. See Notes.

Usage

 * 1) Switch to the [[Image:Workbench_FEM.svg|24px]] FEM Workbench
 * 2) Create an Analysis container by pressing the [[Image:FEM_Analysis.svg|22px]] icon.
 * 3) Create a FEM Solver for Elmer, by pressing the [[Image:FEM_SolverElmer.svg|22px]] icon.
 * 4) * Note: A successful analysis will require at least a Model (2D or 3D), a Material (Fluid or Solid), a Mesh, Equations and Boundary conditions
 * [[Image:Elmer typical file tree.png]]
 * 1) Edit the parameters for the solver in the Property editor  tab of the SolverElmer object in the model tree view
 * 2) Double-click on the  object to prepare an analysis run
 * [[Image:ElmerSolver TaskPanel.png|300px]]
 * 1) Select the path to write the analysis in by clicking
 * 2) Click  to write the case files in the directory selected previously
 * 3) Click  to start the analysis
 * 1) Click  to write the case files in the directory selected previously
 * 2) Click  to start the analysis

Equations

 * To perform the analysis of a particular physical behavior, an Equation must be used (Flow, Heat, Electrostatics...)
 * Disambiguation: The term Equation is used in FreeCAD to describe the different physical mechanisms, the term Solver is used in all Elmer documents. Thus when using in FreeCAD the "Flow Equation", in reality Elmer uses the "Flow Solver" to find a solution to the Navier-Stokes equation.
 * One or several equations can be used at once with Elmer by simply adding the equation object under the SolverElmer object, thus performing multi-physics analyses:


 * 1) Click on the  object in the model tree view
 * 2) Select one ore several of the available equations:
 * 3) * [[Image:FEM_EquationDeformation.svg|32px]] Deformation equation
 * 4) * [[Image:FEM_EquationElasticity.svg|32px]] Elasticity equation
 * 5) * [[Image:FEM_EquationElectricforce.svg|32px]] Electricforce equation
 * 6) * [[Image:FEM_EquationElectrostatic.svg|32px]] Electrostatic equation
 * 7) * [[Image:FEM_EquationFlow.svg|32px]] Flow equation
 * 8) * [[Image:FEM_EquationFlux.svg|32px]] Flux equation
 * 9) * [[Image:FEM_EquationHeat.svg|32px]] Heat equation
 * 10) * [[Image:FEM_EquationMagnetodynamic.svg|32px]] Magnetodynamic equation
 * 11) * [[Image:FEM_EquationMagnetodynamic2D.svg|32px]] Magnetodynamic 2D equation

Solver Settings

 * Depending on the used equations, you must change the default solver settings. They are explained in the Elmer solver settings.
 * The solver will by default perform a steady-state simulation. To perform a transient simulation (how the model behaves/develops over time) see section Timestepping (transient analyses) in the Elmer solver settings.

Visualization
The Elmer solver results are output in result pipeline objects. (Result objects are not possible.)



For transient analyses you get a result pipeline for every output time step. To edit all of them at once, select the in the tree view and set the parameters in the property editor. To make animations of the temporal progression, the best method is currently to
 * Hide the view of the first time result.
 * Select an object of your choice in the tree view, but not a pipeline object.
 * Hover with the mouse over the pipelines.

The result is an animation like this:



Documentation
The following link gives access to the full documentation for Elmer. This includes the manuals as well as tutorials. Note that documentation and files appended with "gui" generally concern the usage of the Elmer GUI and not the FreeCAD implementation of Elmer.