EASY GENERATION OF MODELS/MESHES USING AN OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE SALOME

Computer-aided engineering (CAE) represents the broad usage of computers for engineering problems. It includes computer-aided design (CAD) or computer-aided analysis (CAA) to prepare representation of physical object, to discretize the object, to run analysis and to plot the results. Commercial software have often integrated modeler/mesher/solver/post-processor into one big package. These include ATENA, ABAQUS, ANSYS, SCIA, MARC to mention a few. The open-source CAE has been dropping behind in terms of user friendliness and efficiency. The situation is changing dramatically now since commercial companies support development of open-source. Salome presents a nice platform for pre/post-processing, released under the terms of the GNU LGPL license. This paper will demonstrate application of Salome modeler/mesher for various engineering analyses: steel buckling and multiscale heat analysis. Generation of appropriate mesh is easy and very efficient and can be exported to several computational codes, such as an object-oriented OOFEM. Post-processing can be carried out via VTK data format, for example in Paraview open-source post-processor. Python language can easily glue all components into one package, using advantages of control/modification/verification stages in each data transfer process.