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Significant New Version of OOF Materials Modeling System Released

September 2006

NIST has released version 2 of OOF, a computer program that analyzes the properties of materials with complicated microstructures. A material's microstructure is its microscopic arrangement of regions with different atomic structures, compositions, or orientations. By performing computer simulations based on images of actual microstructures, OOF allows researchers to investigate the relationship between microscopic geometry and macroscopic behavior. OOF has been developed by the NIST Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division in collaboration with the NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory.

The name "OOF" stands for Object Oriented Finite elements, referring to the computational and mathematical techniques that the program employs. The first version of OOF was released in 1998 and was named one of 25 Technologies of the Year by Industry Week magazine. OOF2 is a complete rewrite of OOF1. It addresses a much wider range of physical problems, and uses a more powerful set of mathematical tools. One of OOF2's greatest strengths is its extendibility: users can easily add fields (e.g., temperature), equations (e.g., the force balance equation), and material properties (e.g., elastic modulus). As currently distributed on the web, version 2.0.0 can solve elasticity, thermal conductivity, and piezoelectricity problems. Users at Purdue University have already added a thermo-electricity extension, and it is hoped and expected that users will continue to create and share OOF2 extension modules. OOF can be freely downloaded and redistributed (see below).

A workshop was held at NIST on August 24-25, 2006 to introduce OOF2. The workshop was attended by some 40 people from 5 continents. Five US companies, three US government laboratories, and 18 universities, were represented. Participants learned how to use and extend OOF2, discussed their research using OOF1 and pre-release versions of OOF2, and provided feedback to the OOF developers about future directions for the program.


Contact:
(bullet) Stephen Langer (NIST/MCSD/MMG)
See also:
(bullet) OOF2 website.


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Last updated: 2011-01-12.
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