Elmer FEM solver
Scientific software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elmer is a computational tool for multi-physics problems. It was developed by CSC[2] in collaboration with Finnish universities, research laboratories and industry. Elmer FEM solver is free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2 or any later.[3]
| Elmer FEM solver | |
|---|---|
| |
 One of the simpler examples provided with Elmer, a thermal model of a pump casing, as visualised using the ElmerPost tool | |
| Stable release | |
| Written in | Fortran 90, C and C++ |
| Operating system | Linux, Microsoft Windows, MacOS |
| Platform | command line /GUI Qt v4/v5 |
| Type | CAE |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www |
| Repository | github |
Elmer includes physical models of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electromagnetics, heat transfer and acoustics.[3] These are described by partial differential equations which Elmer solves by the Finite Element Method (FEM).
Elmer comprises several different parts:[4]
- ElmerGrid – A mesh conversion tool, which can be used to convert differing mesh formats into Elmer-suitable meshes.
- ElmerGUI – A graphical interface which can be used on an existing mesh to assign physical models. This generates a "case file" which describes the problem to be solved. It does not show the entire functionality of ElmerSolver in GUI.
- ElmerSolver – The numerical solver which performs the finite element calculations, using the mesh and case files.
- ElmerPost – A post-processing/visualisation module. (Development stopped in favour of other post-processing tools such as ParaView, VisIt, etc.)
The parts of Elmer software may be used independently. Whilst the main module is the ElmerSolver tool - which includes many sophisticated features for physical model solving - additional components are required to create a full workflow. For pre- and post-processing: other tools, such as Paraview, can be used to visualise the output.
The software runs on Unix and Windows platforms and it can be compiled on a large variety of compilers using the CMake building tool. The solver can also be used in a multi-host parallel mode on platforms that support MPI. Elmer's parallelisation capability is one of the strongest sides of this solver.
