Calculix

Calculix

Compressor of a turbocharger
Original author(s)	Guido Dhondt, Klaus Wittig
Stable release	2.8 / 18 January 2015 (2015-01-18)
Operating system	Linux, Windows
Type	Finite element analysis
License	GPL (free software)
Website	www.calculix.de

Calculix is a free and open source finite element analysis application that uses a similar input format to Abaqus. It has an implicit and explicit solver (CCX) written by Guido Dhondt and a pre and post processor (CGX) written by Klaus Wittig. The original software was written for the Linux operating system. Convergent Mechanical has ported the application to the Windows operating system.

The pre processor component of Calculix can generate grid data for the Computational Fluid Dynamics programs duns, ISAAC and OpenFOAM. It can also generate input data for the commercial FEM programs Nastran, Ansys and Abaqus. The pre processor can also generate mesh data from STL files.

There is an active community online that provides support via a Yahoo! discussion group. Convergent Mechanical also provides installation support for their extended version of CalculiX for Windows.

The CalculiX solver is available on the Sun Grid.

A Python library, pycalculix, was written to automate the creation of Calculix models in the Python programming language. The library provides Python access to building, loading, meshing, solving, and querying Calculix results for 2D models. Pycalculix was written by Justin Black. Examples and tutorials are available on the pycalculix site.

Literature

• Guido Dhondt: "The Finite Element Method for Three-Dimensional Thermomechanical Applications". Wiley, Hoboken 2004, ISBN 0-470-85752-8
• Current CCX documentation
• Current CGX documentation
• Getting Started Guide

External links

• Official website
• CalculiX for Windows
• CalculiX Discussion Group
• pycalculix website