ITL Collaborates in Development of Object-Oriented
Finite-Element Tools for Analysis of Material Microstructures
February 1997
A set of tools for analyzing the properties of materials based on images
of their microstructure is being developed in a collaboration between Steve
Langer of ITL and Craig Carter and Ed Fuller of MSEL. Although the
microstructure of a material determines its macroscopic properties and
researchers increasingly
need to understand complicated composite materials, there are no general
methods for evaluating the macroscopic behavior of a given microstructure.
To address this need, two tools are under development. OOF (Object-Oriented
Finite element) is used to analyze finite-element meshes created with PPM2OOF.
PPM2OOF reads images in PPM (Portable Pixel Map) format, assigns materials
properties to them, and creates meshes for OOF. The programs are designed
to be able to attack a wide variety of materials problems, such as elasticity,
thermal diffusion, piezoelectricity, etc., with flexibility assigned boundary
conditions. Furthermore, they must be able to handle many different types
of materials. The programs have been designed under the assumption that
the programmers could not know ahead of time what material systems the
users would want to study, nor what kinds of questions they would want
to ask. Programming in C++ allows new material types (e.g., isotropic,
orthorhombic) and new degrees of freedom (e.g., strain, temperature, electric
field) as well as new operations (e.g., equilibrium, mutation) to be added
easily. Both tools use a common set of easily extensible general-purpose
graphical interface routines. Beta versions of the programs, which solve
the elasticity program and run on SGI workstations, are available through
MSEL's CTCMS web server at http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/~wcraig/oof.html.
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