open-source

Dear iMechanicians,

A week ago, I published a blog post here on the pyLife workshop, which had to start tomorrow. The next day, I was informed by one of the lecturers that he cannot come. I checked with all on-site participants whether we can postpone the workshop, and I organized a Doodle poll to find the optimum dates that fit to the most of registered participants. We have a result today - the workshop is shifted by two months exactly. Below you can find the original invitation with the final dates:

During next week, on September 14-15, we hold a pyLife workshop at the FME Czech Technical University in Prague, Czechia. pyLife is a Python-based open-source library built previously mostly by colleagues from Bosch to deal with the fatigue life estimation (see https://github.com/boschresearch/pylife).

Dear colleagues,

For people interesting in the simulation of solids mechanics with impact contact and friction, we are pleased to announce the release 3.5.0 of the Siconos software. The software is open-source, under GPL Licence and can be found at http://siconos.gforge.inria.fr/

It contains several time--stepping integrators for the nonsmooth dynamics and a large colection of solvers of the frictional contact problems that can be used separately.

Hello everybody,

I just wanted to let those interested in Matlab finite element development and educational environments that the successor to the SOFEA toolkit is now available at

http://hogwarts.ucsd.edu/~pkrysl/faesor

The toolkit now provides in addition to thermal and stress analysis (static and dynamic) also sample simulations from other fields, such as acoustics, nonlinear heat conduction analysis, electrostatics, small-strain plasticity, .... The toolkit now also includes an implementation of the Nodally Integrated Continuum Elements (NICE) which are quite effective for nearly incompressible mechanics problems.

The toolkit and the accompanying textbook are open-source and freely available. The book is also available in print.

Attached is a tar archive for a Fortran 90 library to compute maximum-entropy basis functions.  I have used the G95 compiler. The manual in PDF is also attached and a html version of the same is also available, which provide details on how to install the code and its capabilities. The library is released under the GNU Lesser GPL version 3 license.