dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <johanjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

I've put up my dissertation:

http://www.math.chalmers.se/~johanjan/publications/dissertation.pdf

One of the included papers describes aspects of DOLFIN as an automated
problem solving environment. Some aspects of that are automatic
time-(and space-)discretization of time-dependent PDE and the ability
to use Python (or an arbitrary language) to access the DOLFIN
interface.

TimeDependentPDE abstracts the automatic discretization. Currently the
design is that the user implements the right-hand side f() of the PDE:

dot(u) = f(u, grad(u))

where grad(u) represents that f(u) can also be a function of
space-derivatives of u.

Right now I have implemented multi-field PDEs manually, i.e. by having
a different form for the different fields, and keeping track of the
fields separately. This should be solved by subfunctions, and is in
the plan.

I have moved to implementing solvers (the elasticity solvers for
example) in Python and this is working very well. Certain special
functions where you perform some manual computation which is not
represented in the form can be implemented as static functions in C++
and published as a Python API using SWIG. My plan is to do as much
development as possible in Python.

Ko is also now an "official" component of FEniCS, representing an
automated solid mechanics solver with support for large deformation,
elasto-visco-plasto materials and contact with an efficiency
comparable to a mass-spring solver. I have plans to develop some
real-time application around Ko.

  Johan