FE software
compas_fea use FEA Software in the background to run the analyses.
Currently the following backends are supported to various degrees:
Abaqus
Most support with the compas_fea package is for the finite element software Abaqus by SIMULIA of Dassault Systemes. As this software is generally used by academia, licensing is usually through a university network academic license. Licenses that require the computer to be connected to the same network as the license server will require the host to be connected through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) if they are off-site, through a client such as Cisco AnyConnect or OpenVPN. The Abaqus documentation does not need to be installed for the compas_fea package to run, but is a useful reference. On installation, Abaqus requires a temporary directory to be nominated for saving many different files during analysis, including the most important output database .odb file and various useful log files. Generally this folder will be C:/Temp/ on Windows or ~/Temp on Linux, but a different folder location may be defined at the start of any compas_fea script or through the structure.path attribute of the Structure object (this is described later).
abaqus cae
Note
There is no official support for Abaqus with MacOS, and so Mac users will need to use a Virtual Machine such as Parallels, VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation, and use a Windows or Linux operating system.
alias abaqus_cae="XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 /path/to/abaqus/Commands/abaqus cae -mesa"
alias abaqus="/path/to/abaqus/Commands/abaqus"
Having these aliases set will make the use of the compas_fea package easier as the Abaqus executable can be loaded conveniently, although the Abaqus executable path can also be manually given at the time of analysis. When called for an analysis, Abaqus is run in the background as a sub-process to analyse a model, with feedback presented to the user in the active terminal.
OpenSees
The open-source finite element library OpenSees by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering (PEER) Centre, has cross-platform support and is in active development. The functionality is current behind that of Abaqus but growing (please contact us if you would like to contribute). OpenSees is much leaner than larger software such as Abaqus and Ansys in terms of its file size and resources usage, which leads to a much faster analysis and results extraction time, but has generally much less functionality.
For Windows, the necessary executable files for installation and running OpenSees can be found on the official Download page for registered users (registration is free), for which the current tested version is 3.0.3. Once the required Tcl programming language has been installed, the OpenSees.exe should ideally be saved to C:/OpenSees.exe for the compas_fea package to pick-up its location easily. It can be stored in a different location if preferred, but this location will need to be given for each analysis so that compas_fea knows where to look.
An OpenSees executable for Apple Machines with Intel processors running OS 10.4 or above is also available, making OpenSees the only currently supported FE solver for Mac computers.
For Linux variants, make sure the Tcl programming language is installed on the system, this is often the case by default. The OpenSees source code may be downloaded via here with build instruction at the builds page. The download includes a variety of template Makefile.def files, which should be read carefully to set-up OpenSees for your specific system. Alternatively, OpenSees packages may already be available for your Linux distribution through its default package manager, such as with archlinux. The location of where the OpenSees program has been built to, will need to be given for each analysis, a suggested location would be ~/opensees/.
ANSYS
Support for ANSYS finite element software is in development and is currently only available for Windows.
To be able to use ANSYS as a backend, make sure it is available on the PATH variable.
"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v195\ansys\bin\winx64"