Alejandro Ortiz-Bernardin's blog

As we all know, finite element matrices are sparse and many memory can be saved if their sparsity is exploited. Due to the latter, we are often provoked to declare the nxn stiffness matrix as a sparse one just before the element loop. Be careful of this method since the larger the matrix the slower the assembly operations. There is a better and more efficient way to code the assembly procedure in Matlab. I will show how to accomplish this. For the sake of simplicity, the stiffness matrix of the two-dimensional heat conduction problem on the domain (0,1)x(0,1) is considered.

Hello all,

I am studying some simple finite elements for 2d near-incompressible analysis. Particularly, I am interested in the MINI element. It is basically a 3-node triangle element with nodal pressure and displacement degree of freedoms enriched by a bubble function. Could someone that has some experience with these elements point me out about advantages and drawbacks of using these type of elements?

Thanks,

Alejandro.

I would like to share the following information to all the iMechanica users interested in using TAUCS a library of sparse linear solvers. TAUCS is among the most used libraries of sparse linear solvers and, to my knowledge, its closest equivalent library is SuperLU. For your reference, TAUCS is used in the commercial software Mathematica by Wolfram Research. Its source code can be downloaded from

http://www.tau.ac.il/~stoledo/taucs