Elmer for mechanical calculations

[victorjota]

Hi everybody,

It's my first post here. I want to use Elmer for mechanical calculations and I have some questions.
I have a drawing made in mm. I have meshing it with Netgen, and I have exported in elmer format, far so good.
But, how can to know the units from the drawing? I have read that Elmer takes the units in meters, and I must to scale it with "Coordinate Scaling = 0.001", and then what happening with the load magnitudes. I must use N/mm or N/m (loads)? How can do it?
It's possible to use Pressure for the load? I have not seen this option in Linear Elasticity tabs.
In the Post-processor, Can I show the units in the results?

Thank you very much

[raback]

Hi, Elmer is oblivious to units. Just use them consistantly. If you give your mesh in metres then that should be your length unit elsewhere. -Peter

[jeroenr]

Boundary parameters could be made easier in ElmerGui. Some boundary condition parameters should be clear for beginners (for example displacement), while others are not so clear. Some are even labelled wrong. For example in the fields for force you do NOT enter newtons or pounds, but in ElmerGui you have to enter the pressures in N/m^2 or pounds per square inch. When you know it, it's no big deal. But for beginners stuff like this is very confusing. Same goes for Heat Flux (first I thought it was in J/s (or W), but you have to enter power per area (W/m^2) instead).

[mzenker]

Hi,

this kind of information could be written into the whatis tags of the solver xml file (IMO at least). You can view it by clicking on the field and pressing Shift-F1. Feel free to edit the xml accordingly and post it here, I am sure the Elmer team will be happy to include it into the distribution...

Matthias