I was hoping to start writing some very basic FE code to solve simple structural problems. I would not consider myself a programmer and only know C++, Fortran, and MATLAB. This will be difficult but is something that I have a lot of interest in. Does anyone know any good books that address writing FE programs using any of these languages? Thanks.

Programming the Finite Element Method by Smith and Griffiths.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services
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I would suggest using MATLAB because of the ease in which you can write your FE code and plot results and deformed shapes.

We did in our FEA class in college, the course website is still up , check out the homework problems and solutions which has the matlab code here: http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/AE420/Homework/ho...

A different perspective:

You don't have to be an FE developer to be a good FE modeler. There are a LOT of things you can do with clever modeling tricks. But, of course, if you know there is no way you can model a fancy boundary condition, material or, say, the degrees of freedom provided in typical software codes isn't sufficient, then yes, you need to understand linear and nonlinear finite element analysis (and a little bit of continuum mechanics).

http://www.eng-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=376

The basic framework already exists, OpenFEM for matlab works and is useable for large projects. I'm sure if you extended it with new element types etc they'd appreciate it.

http://support.sdtools.com/gf/project/openfem

Cheers

Greg Locock


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Thanks for the advice. I have checked out a few books and hopefully I can make some headway. Missil3, I found the link to UIUC very interesting and browsed through a lot of it. Unfortunately many of the links were closed. That is impressive that that is what those students do in their senior year of undergrad. I was doing stuff similar, but with Maple, my final year in grad school. Yikes!

Ya I see a lot of those links are dead, but if you go here: http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/AE420/Homework/

(without the homework.html at the end) you can see all the files there, the links in the .html file are wrong you should be able to get most of the file from the directory listing.

The class has a lot of graduates students taking it too! its a tech elective for undergrads.

The link that you have provided did not work anymore (http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/AE420/Homework/ ...or http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ME471/ ). If you have the programming assignments and their solution from that web pages, could you provide me those or if there exist any alternative for those material could you inform me?

Dears,
Still no reply about the materials in (http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/AE420/Homework/ or http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ME471/ ) web sites. The web sites can not be reached. Any help would be appreciated.

The course materials are likely to disappear at the beginning of a semester, you might have to wait until May for all of the homework and solutions to be posted online. I would use an open-source finite element solver instead.

This book is excellent and they have a Python version of their code available (pyFEM). You can get this up and running pretty quickly, then just feed it nodes, elements, constraints, and loads.
http://www.amazon.com/Nonlinear-Analysis-Structure...

The fenics project has a great community of grad students and researchers. It is a really robust solver, but it is pretty well known as one of the most complicated Python libraries to set up. This might be a bit more than you need.
http://www.amazon.com/Automated-Solution-Different...
http://fenicsproject.org/