Whatever happened to FEMVIEW?

[gwolf2]

I used to use FEMGEN, ABAQUS and FEMVIEW a lot, many many moons ago.

Does anyone still use FEMGEN or FEMVIEW these days?

gwolf

 

[johnhors]

Gwolf,

FEMGEN as sold by FEGS Ltd changed its name to FAM in the early 90's (I think - too long ago to be sure of dates!) then sometime around when FEGS were bought by ITI Transcendata it changed its name again and is now currently called CADFIX , and is really the only derivative of FEMGEN still to be maintained and sold.

As I suspect you remember the days when FEGS Ltd. worked in conjunction with FEMSYS Ltd. to market their FEMGEN and FEMVIEW products respectively, this arrangement eventually came to an end around the early 90's (again not sure exactly). After which FEGS added their own post processor to their version of FEMGEN and FEMSYS went back to use the original Norwegian version of FEMGEN with FEMVIEW and marketed it as FEMGV. They were later to work together again when a special version of Cadfix was produced to enable CAD import into FEMGV.

In the early 2000's the Dutch company TNO Diana bought out Femsys Ltd and development of FEMGV effectively ended as Femsys ceased to exist.

 

[corus]

FAM disappeared just after Ababqus brought out its preprocessor CAE, though I'm not sure if the two are directly linked. I've noticed that Calculix has a FAM type way of inputting data if you want to go back to the old glory days of key bashing in commands.

corus

 

[johnhors]

That's because the guys at MTU in Germany who write and maintain CalculiX cut their in FEA using Femgen/Femview and wrote the pre and post processor for calculix to use the same command line language. Which is fine for those familiar with it, but probably deters the majority of would be users, which is a shame as the solver is very good.