FreeCAD News

It’s incred­i­ble that we have free and open source CAD, then even more amaz­ing we have the capa­bil­i­ty to cre­ate com­plex assem­blies. On top of this, tools like Finite Ele­ment Meth­ods and analy­sis make FreeCAD huge­ly capa­ble. There­fore the sight of the above video from MbD­FEM where they are com­bin­ing and apply­ing Finite Ele­ment Meth­ods in dynam­ic Multi­body assem­blies is frankly jaw dropping. 

This open source devel­op­ment is from the part­ner­ship of Dr. Aik-Siong Koh and Dr. Jose Egas, if the name Dr. Koh seems famil­iar, Dr. Koh worked with Ond­sel and devel­oped the solver that under­pins the Assem­bly work­bench now built into the main col­lec­tion of FreeCAD Workbenches. 

MbD­FEM work with a col­lec­tion of tools, obvi­ous­ly FreeCAD pro­vides the CAD envi­ron­ment but also acts as a pre and post proces­sor for the MdBFEM process. FreeCADMbD is MbD­FEM’s cus­tom Multi­body Dynam­ics solver. MBDyn is a free and open source gen­er­al pur­pose Multi­body Dynam­ics analy­sis suite and Cal­culix is a well known and adopt­ed open source FEM solver. 

You can check out FreeCADMbD and some build instruc­tions on the repos­i­to­ry, but MbD­FEM point out it is a work in progress. MbD­FEM are keen to hear about any desired fea­tures and sug­ges­tions for mod­els to sim­u­late. Any exam­ple sim­u­la­tions will be made pub­licly avail­able but, for a mod­est fee, MbD­FEM are hap­py to car­ry out sim­u­la­tion work on pro­pri­etary models. 

We wish MbD­FEM well with their future devel­op­ment of this amaz­ing project and look for­ward to more tan­ta­lis­ing video’s of these fas­ci­nat­ing simulations!