
NairnFEAMPM Introduction
The NairnFEAMPM application is a visual front end for running and visualizing static finite element analysis (FEA) and dynamic material point method (MPM) analysis. The calculations are done in C++ code engines called NairnFEA and NairnMPM. These code engines can run on any computer system, but NairnFEAMPM makes it easy to create and edit input commands, to run the code, and finally to visualize the results, all on a Macintosh computer.
In brief, you use a text editing window to enter input commands for the code engines. The input commands can either use the built-in interpretative language of NairnFEAMPM Commands or can be direct XML
commands supported by the code engines (see OSUPDocs wiki for documentation of XML
commands). When using the interpretive language, the commands are interpreted and converted to XML
input commands for running the code engines. The advantage of using interpretative commands is that they support many programming language options, such as variables, loops, conditionals, and subroutines, that are not possible in direct XML
commands.
When the input commands are ready, they can be input to the code engines to run calculations. After the calculations are done, NairnFEAMPM has many options for analyzing and plotting the results.
Additional Information
- NairnFEAMPM used to be provided as a self-contained package, but evolution of the MacOS has made the difficult. It fact, it current seems impossible to provide a package that can also run in parallel (due to limitation of builtin Apple c++ libraries. As a results, NairnFEAMPM does not include the NairnFEA and NairnMPM binaries. Before you can use NairnFEAMPM calculations, you therefore have download, compile, in link all required binaries.
- This documentation explains how to use NairnFEAMPM to run and and visualize FEA or MPM calculations. It assumes the user is already familiar with either FEA or MPM. The reader is referred to numerous references for further reading on these numerical methods.
- If you are interested in calculations on a non-Macintosh computer using the NairnFEA and NairnMPM code engines, you can refer to the nairn-mpm-fea project web site. This web site has open source code and documentation for the code engines. A self-contained package for Windows computers is available for download.