piezoelectric/magnetostriction solvers?

[wab41]

Hello All,

I am a first year PhD student working on some finite element modelling as part of my project. I am quite new to FEM in general but have seen quite a few papers referencing Elmer and it seems like a very versatile tool so thought I would come here to see if it was possible to use for my specific case too.

The materials I am looking in to are piezoelectric and magnetostrictive - so my first question would be whether these effects can be implemented using the current version of the Elmer software, and if so, is there documentation showing a breakdown of the computations/calculations? I think I have seen that there is a piezo section within the electrostatics solver, however, I wanted to confirm how it was implemented before using it so that I could understand what was going on. If I am not mistaken, the way it is done uses a forward or hierarchical coupling method (please correct me if I'm wrong) and I was wondering how this would translate from the constitutive equations that describe the piezoelectric effect. Most methods I have seen require finding the weak form of the PDEs, however, I was wondering if this forward-coupling intrinsically follows this or if there is some other (mathematical) description? Admittedly, however, I have not used Fortran before so I may be a little bit slower on the uptake than I would like when looking at the code.

If the method already implemented is indeed valid for the piezoelectric material in my case then I was wondering if a similar method could be used for magnetostriction? In this case coupling the magnetic and mechanical fields.

In the end I hope to have a magnetostrictive material embedded in a piezoelectric matrix, but to begin I think it is better to make sure each part works properly. Just to check though - do you think it would be possible to couple these two materials (via strain mediation) using Elmer?

Any help, advice or other would be greatly appreciated and thank you for reading my query.

Kind Regards,
Will

[kevinarden]

I believe that you can get there with Elmer. Which operating system are you using Linux or Windows?
You should look at the getting started document
Model Manual
Tutorials
https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics/elmer/doc/
There are also test cases that go beyond the tutorials
https://github.com/ElmerCSC/elmerfem/tr ... /fem/tests