MeshPy

MeshPy is a general purpose 3D beam finite element input generator written in python3. It contains basic geometry creation and manipulation functions to create complex beam geometries, including rotational degrees of freedom for the beam nodes. It can be used to create input files for the following finite element solvers:

4C (academic finite element solver)
Abaqus (commercial software package)

MeshPy can easily be adapted to create input files for other solvers. MeshPy is developed at the Institute for Mathematics and Computer-Based Simulation (IMCS) at the Universität der Bundeswehr München.

How to cite MeshPy?

Whenever you use or mention MeshPy in some sort of scientific document/publication/presentation, please cite MeshPy as described on the MeshPy website.

Feel free to leave a ⭐ on GitHub.

How to use MeshPy?

Basic tutorials can be found in the directory tutorial/.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing to MeshPy, we welcome your collaboration. For general questions, feature request and bug reports please open an issue.

If you contribute actual code, fork the repository and make the changes in a feature branch. Depending on the topic and amount of changes you also might want to open an issue. To merge your changes into the MeshPy repository, create a pull request to the main branch. A few things to keep in mind:

It is highly encouraged to add tests covering the functionality of your changes, see the test suite in tests/.
MeshPy uses black to format python code. Make sure to apply black to the changed source files.
Feel free to add yourself to the CONTRIBUTORS file.

Installation

MeshPy is developed with python3.12. Other versions of Python might lead to issues. It is recommended to use virtual environments with python. On Debian systems the following packages have to be installed

sudo apt-get install python3-venv python3-dev

Now a virtual environment can be created (chose an appropriate directory for this, e.g., /home/user/opt)

python3 -m venv meshpy-env

The created virtual environment can be loaded with

source meshpy-env/bin/activate

From now on we assume that the virtual enviroment is loaded. To install meshpy go to the repository root directory

cd <path_to_meshpy>

Install meshpy via pip

pip install .

If you intend to actively develop meshpy, install it in editable mode

pip install -e .

If cython code is changed, it has to be recompiled. This can be done by running (in the root directory)

python3 setup.py build_ext --inplace

Optional, a path to the 4C executable can be given in order to run some combined tests with 4C

export FOUR_C_RELEASE=path_to_4C

To check if everything worked as expected, run the tests

cd <path_to_meshpy>/tests
python3 testing_main.py

Also run the performance tests (the reference time values and host name might have to be adapted in the file <path_to_meshpy>/tests/performance_testing.py)

cd <path_to_meshpy>/tests
python3 performance_testing.py

Optional dependency on ArborX

MeshPy can optionally execute its geometric search functions using the C++ library ArborX. First make sure the pybind11 submodule is loaded

cd <path_to_meshpy>
git submodule update --init

To setup meshpy with ArborX, cmake and Kokkos are available on your system (the preferred variant is via Spack). Create a build directory

mkdir -p <path_to_meshpy>/build/geometric_search

Configure cmake and build the extension

cd <path_to_meshpy>/build/geometric_search
cmake ../../meshpy/geometric_search/src/
make -j4

If the ArborX extension is working correctly can be checked by running the geometric search tests