[Geoqus] Calculix

[Gabriele Morra]

Dear geoqus members,
  I think it could be of general interests for all of you to know  
that there is a free source code, called Calculix, which reproduces  
the mechanical implicit solver of abaqus and performs substantially  
the same for geodynamic application. I tested it during few months  
and I found that one obtains exactly the same results of ABAQUS for a  
general 3-dimensional simulation of visco-elastic creep and visco- 
elastic plate bending. Given that it is open source and the input  
file of Calculix is the same file.inp of abaqus, it would be great if  
others would try to use it and test it.

For my work this is a long step forward, because I developed a  
coupled BEM-FEM algorithm, somehow complicated to implement with  
abaqus employing the user-subroutines. Therefore now I am extracting  
from Calculix the routines that are useful for Geodynamics  
applications: viscoelastic creep, three-dimensional three-quadratic  
elements, the implicit solver, and most important the large strain  
formulation. The code is indeed much larger and mostly written in  
fortran 77. I am trying to embed or rewrite the useful routines in a  
Python framework in which I already wrote the BEM code.

If anybody is interested in this porting to geodynamics of the FEM  
code, it would be great to benchmark and test it together. To have  
substantially an open source version of ABAQUS can be a breakthrough  
for geo-mechanical applications in geoscience.
The code is developed by a German Mechanical Engineer (Guido Dhondt).  
The source and the documentation can be downloaded from the web-sites  
www.calculix.de or www.dhondt.de.

Regards
Gabriele Morra
ETH Zurich