yade-dev team mailing list archive

[Václav Šmilauer <eudoxos@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi fellows,

I received the following mail yesterday from a geological engineer:

> I recently found your software Yade on the internet,
> which really arouse my interest. I downloaded it and
> tried to learn it, but encountered with some questions,
> and the most inconvenience is that there is no detailed
> introduction about those constitutive laws used in Yade,
> and I am wondering that if you could show me exactly what
> kind of laws they are, the equations and detailed instruction
> of them would help me to recogonize them and understand how
> they work, and I would really appreciate that. 

What would you reply to such a question? (seriously)

Looking at the documentation at
https://www.yade-dem.org/sphinx/yade.wrapper.html#lawfunctor you might see
that its state is miserable. Therefore I would like to ask authors of the
respective contact laws to write documentation on them; it should mention
at least:

1. The mathematical formulation of the model, or a reference to a paper
which was _rigorously_ followed. Most models do not entail more than 10-20
formulas and it is not such a big pain to write them.
2. For what kind of materials is the model supposed to be used.
3. Its limitations such as instabilities in corner cases, how well was it
tested.

Do not think documentation is unimportant. Since there are people outside
academia using Yade (and there will be more of them in short time), then
documentation is plain necessity. If there is agreement, I can add an
"experimental" (or "undoc" or ...) feature (disabled by default), which
would make compile stuff that is not documented or tested properly.

I am not excluding myself, the concrete law is not much documented either.

Please help Yade.

Cheers, v