Solids

Here you can read about my offerings with respect to mechanical engineering simulation of solids, a.k.a. finite element analysis (FEA). First, some general remarks:

• I apply the general principle that what SimScale can do, I can do, too (in many cases, my in-house computer with 16 3.4 GHz cores will be used).
• In addition, I can do everything that the software packages Code_Aster (read more here) and CalculiX can do (shell or beam models, for instance).
• A standard delivery will consist of results files that can be read by the free postprocessor ParaView (read more here)
• - plus a harddisk file for either Docker or a virtual computer, enabling the customer to redo the entire analysis at home (read more here)
• - meaning that already on the first delivery, the customer is close to having the entire procedure templated or automated!

A standard delivery is sparse when it comes to documentation. Further documentation may be produced by the hour.

Additional possibilities

Through the years, I have developed many modifications of standard FEA procedures. For instance:

• Modal data from a centrifuge frame have been extracted at the main bearing locations and exported to another software system by means of an SDRC Universal File.
• The surface stress states of a large number of load cases have been collected and entered into a fatigue evaluation according to a procedure devised by Roger Rabb of Wärtsilä Diesel, Finland.
• Simple matrix data for linear time-invariant systems have been extracted from transient simulations (see here).
• Swarms of simulation data have been collected and handled by statistics analysis software (see here).
• And then there is of course more deliberate scripting and automation.

Do not hesitate to bring forward any wish of having existing procedures modified to serve a special purpose. Until now, I have programmed in bash, Python, Visual Basic, Matlab, Fortran, C, C++ and C# to get things done.

Tailor-made meshes

My old-school upbringing tends to make me frown at today's idiom of spray-painting millions of elements onto an unprepared geometry and then mindlessly turn the crank. In Gmsh (see also here), I believe to have found a tool that I can use for the rest of my career. Especially when heading towards automation, it is a very bad idea not to create meshes and leverage symmetries according to a plan.

and ANSYS, too

I have been an ANSYS user since version 4.4 in the early nineties. Bring me a license and I'll make a reference simulation or whatever you want me to do. It could be to provide an alternative to ANSYS ACT.

A pretty picture. For more pretty pictures, see here.