About preCICE on Windows, and couple Fluent and Abaqus

Is preCICE for me?
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Hello everyone, I am new to preCICE.

I have read the article “preCICE – A fully parallel library for multi-physics surface coupling” in detail and am excited about the capabilities of preCICE. I have also successfully run some of the official examples on Linux, and they worked well.

However, for my specific problem, I need to use preCICE on a Windows system to couple Fluent and Abaqus. I have diligently searched this forum and found it difficult to completely resolve my queries:

  1. Regarding the use of preCICE on Windows, I found this open issue: Compiling precice on Windows 10 with MSVC 2017 Community · Issue #200 · precice/precice · GitHub. It has not been updated for a while, and I am curious if there are any recent developments for Windows. I do not think using WSL is a good solution as I would like to compile and run smoothly on Windows. Is this still time-consuming and not robust at the moment?
  2. I found the fluent-adapter: GitHub - precice/fluent-adapter: preCICE-adapter for the CFD code ANSYS Fluent (currently unmaintained), which has not been maintained for a while but seems to still be functional. However, I am curious if there is an available Abaqus adapter? I could not find one.

Finding answers on this forum would greatly help me decide whether to firmly continue using preCICE. Regardless, thank you to all the developers for your efforts.

Best regards.

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Hi @studyhardhardhard

Let me answer the second question: we have coupled Abaqus to other simulation software via preCICE. The coupling was rather basic, so we do not have a sophisticated adapter yet. The principle idea is to call the Fortran API of preCICE from a user-defined file, like for example, VUMAT.f. Depending on which quantities are being sent and received in a coupling, and how strong the coupling is, a similar Fortran file can be written for a particular Abaqus case.

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We have not looked into compiling for Windows (meaning: natively and with the MSVC compiler) since that issue. The whole Windows support is not really a priority since WSL. But it definitely is important and different.

Would by any chance preCICE compiled with MinGW (available in MSYS2 and maintained by the community) be an option for you?

Note that you want to deal with several aspects that are currently not mainstream for us (Fluent, Abaqus, Windows). Expect many rough edges, more than the usually encountered.

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Hello Ishaan,

is the Abaqus adapter released? I’m currently working on a similar project and I’m very interested.

Thank you,
Alice

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Hi @alicezanella

We do not have a complete adapter for Abaqus, but really one simple use case where we have coupled Abaqus in a volumteric way. An explicit coupling is done. This is still work in progress, and you can look at the relevant files at: tutorials/two-scale-composite-laminate/meso-laminate-abaqus at abaqus-multiscale · precice/tutorials · GitHub

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Hello, I would like to know if there is a way to run preCICE on a Windows system now. If so, can I use existing adapters for coupling, such as Fluent or others? I’m very interested. Thank you.

Finding answers to these questions would greatly assist me in determining whether to continue with preCICE. Regardless, I would like to express my gratitude to all the developers for their hard work.

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@yang_liu there is still no official support for native Windows builds. This is now low on our priorities since:

  1. Many users that just had Windows systems now use WSL to run Linux from Windows
  2. There is a community-maintained MSYS2 package that builds preCICE on Windows using the MinGW compiler stack: preCICE and mingw packages
  3. Even if we make preCICE work natively on Windows, many of the simulation codes we couple to don’t work on Windows.

In any case, contributions are very welcome (see the open issue in the first post).