How can I create a CalculiX mesh and configuration?

Non-preCICE
1

This is a common question we often face, as many of our tutorials use CalculiX as the structure solver.

I am barely familiar with CalculiX and I just wanted to collect here some resources, together with you.

Reading the CalculiX documentation (PDF on the website) and manually setting up a case is one option.

Another option that some people have had good experiences with is using the FEM Workbench of FreeCAD.

What other options do you know? What are common tips and tricks you can offer to the community?

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2

I was able to use Cubit (Free meshing software - Coreform Cubit Learn - Free non-commercial-use license), and export my mesh and configuration as if it were an Abaqus input file. Then, I used a text editor to manually tweak a few things to align it with what the CalculiX documentation called for.

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3

Thanks for the suggestion! Do you maybe remember which parameters you had to tweak or which resources you found useful for that, apart from the CalculiX documentation?

4

I just revisited this after a while. I’m attempting to pre-stress a geometry using a simulation. Instead of using my normal method, I took an opportunity to look for other options out there. I found this:

https://prepomax.fs.um.si/

As far as I can tell, it’s only available on Windows. It has some excellent documentation and can export Calculix *.inp files which can be directly executed using the Calculix adaptor. I only started using it today and have already produced some results.

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5

See also this very nice tutorial of Torsten Schenkel on YouTube: FSI for vascular flows using OpenFOAM, preCICE, and Calculix - YouTube

This community project answers many questions you may have on setting up a coupled case with OpenFOAM and CalculiX. For the CalculiX part, they use FreeCAD to create the geometry, unical3 to convert it to a CalculiX mesh, and frdToVTKConverter for post-processing.

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I’m revisiting some things and found this youtube playlist helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaWK58rtjzvS2ZKClbldRYN8Iu_gTmsC0

1 Like
7

Hi everyone,
for preprocessing and converting the results to paraview you could use, as mentioned above, cubit and the opensource component for the calculix integration.

Full preprocessing can be done with the component. The jobs can be run also from cubit if necessary.

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When the results can be linked with the data in cubit (which usually works, except for shells and beams with 3d output) then the information of the element-, node- and sidesets will be used to create partitioned data set collections. So viewing single parts is no problem at all.

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Not just the .frd data will be converted but also the .dat data with integration point results. The position of the integration points will be computed according to the shape functions and gauss points from the calculix source code.

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If someone finds bugs or have feature request just send me a message or open a issue on github.

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9

I only know of these videos from YouTube and I don’t have any other contact information.

10

Hi everyone,

In my experience, hypermesh can be used to generate mesh, and it can output the .inp file (if you set the output format as abaqus). And then the CalculiX Advanced Environment can be used to set parameters.

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1 Like
11

In the preCICE Workshop 2024, @Claudio and me presented a course module on preparing an FSI simulation coupling CalculiX and OpenFOAM. There, we used FreeCAD to prepare the CalculiX mesh and we directly edited the CalculiX configuration in a text editor.

You can find the material on Zenodo: