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). https://www.csc.fi/web/elmer

Creating the ElmerSolver 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, Magnetostatics and Electrical Forces. It can also be used for mechanical FEA through the Elasticity equation or any combination of the aforementioned equations.

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


 * 1) Go to the CSC binaries resources for Elmer: https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics/elmer/bin/ OR https://www.csc.fi/web/elmer/binaries
 * 2) Download and install the version best suited to your Operating System (Windows 64 bits or Linux)
 * 3) In FreeCAD go to Edit-->Preferences-->FEM-->Elmer
 * 4) Link the correct path for both ElmerGrid.exe and ElmerSolver.exe

You are ready to use Elmer in FreeCAD.

Usage

 * 1) In FreeCAD go to [[Image:Workbench_FEM.svg|32px]] FEM workbench
 * 2) Create an [[Image:Fem-analysis.svg|32px]]Analysis container
 * 3) Create a FEM Solver for Elmer [[Image:Fem-elmer.svg]] 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]]
 * 4) Edit the parameters for the solver in the tab of the ElmerSolver object in the model tree
 * 5) Double-click on the ElmerSolver object to prepare an analysis run [[Image:ElmerSolver TaskPanel.png]]
 * 6) Select the path to write the analysis in
 * 7) Click Write to write the case files in the directory selected previously
 * 8) Click Run to start the analysis

About Equations:
 * Each type of analysis in Elmer is called an Equation (Flow, Heat, Electrostatics...)
 * One or several equations can be used at once with Elmer by simply adding the Equation object under the ElmerSolver object:


 * 1) Click on the ElmerSolver object
 * 2) Select an equation:
 * [[Image:Fem-equation-elasticity.svg|32px]] Equation elasticity
 * [[Image:Fem-equation-flow.svg|32px]] Equation flow
 * [[Image:Fem-equation-heat.svg|32px]] Equation heat
 * [[Image:Fem-equation-electrostatic.svg|32px]] Equation electrostatic
 * [[Image:Fem-equation-fluxsolver.svg|32px]] Equation fluxsolver

Documentation
The following link gives access to the full documentation for Elmer https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics/elmer/doc/ 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.