Hello there,
I’m new to the forum, my name is Johannes and I’m glad to be here! :)
I am am mechanical engineer and have some professional experience in Ansys. On my quest to find a cheap FEA program for personal use, I stumbled upon Tanatloc. It is open source and is developed by some guys, who are active in the FreeFEM++ community. As a matter of fact, Tanatloc uses the FreeFEM algorithms in the background, but also does Step import, mesh creation, and has a very nice user interface in my opinion. What is really neat, since it directly uses the FreeFEM language, different solvers can be integrated. I just wrote them the day before yesterday to ask about a magnetostatic solver and they promptly responded, that it this is planned for the next release.
From what I have seen, Tanatloc is not very well known and rarely gets mentioned in forums. Maybe you can check out the software by yourself, I have the feeling, that this could become a very handy and cost free tool in the future!
https://tanatloc.com/
I am not in any way related to Tanatloc or Airthium, the parent company. I just find it very cool, what they are doing!
Hello,
I haven’t heard of that one so I’m interested in finding out more. “Tantaloc” is a strange name.
I have used Simscale when I needed a free and easily accessible FEM software. Online interface through your browser, a lot like Onshape.
A coworker of mine who is doing a Master’s thesis part time is building simulations with OpenFOAM right now. He is finding it easy to use and getting a lot of support from peers and his mentors. That kind of support is valuable when you get stuck on something.
I experimented with ANSYS last year and I wasn’t impressed. It’s great software but it is so expensive I really think they are abandoning every market except the large institutions and OEM’s. It would have been a money pit for us.
Don’t forget that if you have the right package of Solidworks or Inventor, a FEA package is built in.
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There are many free NASA codes that you can use. Don’t forget that PATRAN and NASTRAN were originally developed by NASA. The trick is getting support and being able to navigate an often terrible user interface.
I, personally, am still considering MSC APEX. It’s on the more expensive side, but less than ANSYS and easier to use.
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Yeah I have also tried Simscale a few times, this one comes natural to me since I use onshape for a few years now. Onshape Pro also has simulation integrated now, but just basic solvers for mechanical stress and deformation.
I never heard of OpenFOAM before! As far as I can tell, it is mainly used for but not limited to CFD.
Yeah I understand your point completely! It is the same with Siemens NX in my opinion. It is sooo expensive but the interface still looks like something from the year 2000 at least in some areas.
That is what I am using right now in my daily job. We have on Solidworks Premium license we can use for FEA.
I guess, the main area were a lot of FEA programs lack, are magnetostatic simulations. Which is a pity, because magnetism sometimes is really hard to grasp, so a solver that does the work for you and calculates the flux and the resulting Lorentz forces is really helpful!
Hm in the case of Nastran, it is used by Inventor right? So in this case the interface is something usable. Provided, you have the right package as Steven mentioned.
Never heard of MSC APEX. Will look into this, thank you!
I thought the Inventor embedded FEA was essentially “Ansys-Lite”? Dunno, it’s changed a few times over the years, and it’s been a few years since I had the “Pro” version with embedded FEA. I too have been using Simscale recently, and am ok with it.
I do like seeing younger companies coming along like Tantaloc, with developers who are responsive, and user communities that share resources and knowledge. Hope they can make a go of this and earn themselves a few bucks to boot.
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Johannes,
For magnetic simulations, look for FEMM.
HomePage:Finite Element Method Magnetics
Thank you for the suggestion! However, I’ve tried FEMM in the past and I just couldn’t work productively with it, since the interface and workflow are very old unfortunately. This may sound picky, but I am concerned with how much time it takes to draw slightly complex geometries and even more than that, how much effort it is to run multiple iterations of a design.
Nonetheless I appreciate the opportunity that free software like FEMM provides, it certainly is not a bad software!
Hm as far as I know, the Ansys solver never was part the Inventor FEM package. I may be misinformed though.
Yeah I also hope, that the software gets more recognition and enough feedback is provided, to polish it further. In this case, the parent company is Airthium, which uses Tanatloc as inhouse FEA solver for their prototyping.
I developed a strange and convoluted workflow to deal with FEMM’s limitations. Once practiced, it can go very quickly.
I would model all geometry in Autocad and save it as DWG. Then export to DXF. Import DXF into FEMM, and populate the materials. That population was the slow part, but if your iterations don’t change much, there’s a workaround.
Each time you iterate, you save a new Autocad file to DWG and DXF as before, but don’t import into FEMM right away.
Instead, open the last FEMM file, save as a new file. Then delete the geometry only. You’ll see all the material assignments still there floating in space. Import the new geometry from the DXF, and it lands in the same spot the old geometry was. As long as the new geometry isn’t radically different from the old, many of your previous material assignments will still line up. Sometimes, selection filters also work in your favour to choose all the materials in a circular volume, and rotate them a few degrees.
It’s stupid, I know. It’s also free. I can tolerate a lot of workarounds, for free.
In a few hours I could have dozens of iterations worked out.