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 Finite Element Method | FEM for Cactus
In the Summer of 2005, I worked on a pretest code to provide finite element support in Cactus. As Cactus expands, it is inevitable to find some customers/users asking for support for FEM in Cactus. Although there are many FEM toolkits lying around, free or not, not so many of them provide such a transparent framework as Cactus does. However due tothe fact that Cactus was originally designed to solve PDE's with fine difference methods, lot of tools well tested in all these years arenot so handy for FEM. Also, new data structures should be introduced to better represent the concepts defined and used in FEM. Instead of trying to make use of any existing thorns, we started from scratch. | | Mesh Reader & CMesh
To get things started, a mesh reader was coded up first to read in a testing mesh. CSR (Compressed Sparse Row) format was used to store mesh information. CST (Cactus Specification Tool) was modified by David to deal with specifications added to support FEM in Cactus. To visualize the mesh we were dealing with, a very simple tool CMesh was developed based on Qt libraries. It is able to use any mesh reader available to CactusFEM since they share the same argument list. | | FEM in Brief
The Finite Element Method: Linear Static and Dynamic Finite Element Analysis by Thomas J. R. Hughes is a very good by mathematically heavy book on FEM |
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