FEM Install

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Revision as of 18:11, 4 April 2019 by Vocx (talk | contribs) (Moved further information to the end, and raised it one level)

Introduction

To be able to perform finite element analysis (FEA) using the FEM Workbench FreeCAD makes use of two external programs: one is used for generating the FEM Mesh and the other for solving the system of equations. You can test if your FreeCAD installation is ready for FEA by loading and analyzing the FEM CalculiX Cantilever 3D example which is included with every installation since FreeCAD 0.17.

FEM solver

For solving the system of equations, CalculiX is the default solver. FreeCAD writes a CalculiX input file, starts the solver, and reads the output. This means the CalculiX binary is standalone and independent from FreeCAD. Because of this and since there are more possibilities to get a mesh it is recommended to install the solver first.

FEM mesh generator

In order to create a FEM Mesh, FreeCAD uses Netgen as the default mesher. For this to work, FreeCAD needs to be compiled against the Netgen libraries. Another common mesher that can be used is GMSH, which needs to be installed separately. See FEM Mesh for various possibilities of obtaining a mesh.

Installation of external software

Windows

The FreeCAD packages available from the download page already include Netgen and CalculiX, so no additional software needs to be installed.

Linux

Linux distributions package software in their own repositories. Look for the packages netgen and calculix-ccx or ccx in your package manager.

Ubuntu PPA

The freecad-stable and freecad-daily personal package archives (PPA) provide a more recent version of FreeCAD than is available in the Ubuntu repositories. These PPAs include the most recent netgen and calculix-ccx packages as well. See Install on Unix for more information on setting up the repositories.

If the PPA is already added to your system, install the packages as follows

sudo apt-get install netgen
sudo apt-get install calculix-ccx

The freecad-community PPA also provides netgen and calculix-ccx packages for testing. If they are stable enough, they will be migrated to the daily or stable builds.

For developers: the thread Ubuntu Repository discusses the creation of the Ubuntu PPA packages. At the time it was written, CalculiX was not included in the Debian repositories, so there were several personal packages in Launchpad. Only one package should be installed.

CalculiX

Since CalculiX is a standalone software you either can install a CalculiX binary or compile CalculiX yourself. Any CalculiX version from 2.7.X works with FreeCAD. Since there hasn't been much changes in CalculiX resently lower versions than 2.7.X might work as well.

Install CalculiX Binary

There are only a few Linux Distributions which are known to have CalculiX Packages in their Repositories. Following a list:

Compile CalculiX

Compiling CalculiX is not as easy as it is with many OpenSource software. There are many different resources at FreeCAD forum and the internet. Check out the following:

Netgen

There have been mixed results with the Netgen mesher and the compilation of FreeCAD with Netgen support.

  • ToDo

OSX

This information may be out of date. If you are an OSX user, please test and clean up this section

The OSX development packages of FreeCAD may include Netgen but may not include CalculiX.

See this forum post FEM on Mac OSX for information on installing CalculiX, and an updated post for more recent information.

The following posts may be outdated:

Further information

The FEM Workbench is under constant development. The most recent information is found in the FreeCAD forum.

If you have problems installing Netgen or CalculiX, or another external tool, please search the forum: