Dear Reader,

Welcome back to another newsletter and especially to those who recently joined the newsletter - welcome. We are a community that is growing everyday and I hope you have been finding value reading these weekly computational modelling perspectives of mine.

This week, I am reflecting on different FEM solvers as well as sign-post the mailing list to my next digital product.

ABAQUS, ANSYS, COMSOL: Which is the best FE software?

I received a direct email this week from a CM Videos Insider requesting my help on a computational modelling challenge the Insider was having with COMSOL. As I do not currently do a lot of modelling with COMSOL, I had to reluctantly decline but that got me thinking. There are so many FE software and which is the best, if this is even a realistic question to consider. I will be focussing here solely on the three big and now super popular ones namely ABAQUS, ANSYS and COMSOL. I know there are others but I can talk about those in future.

I fell in love with ABAQUS during my PhD days at Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford where my then supervisor - Prof Paul Buckley - encouraged me to learn the software and use it in modelling of finite deformation of a unidirectional composite that was the basis of my PhD. I then went on to self-teach myself the software, develop a user-defined subroutine for implementing the constitutive models I developed for the composite as well as even do some programming work with ABAQUS using Python. I have since been a sucker for ABAQUS.

During this period, I was also exposed to COMSOL. This was the early days of the company and they were doing the rounds in universities trying to get early users of their product. I remember sitting in a computer laboratory with other PhD students at Oxford trying out the software as the COMSOL representatives tried to 'sale us' on the importance of the code. One of the things I liked the most about COMSOL was the easy integration with MATLAB which unfortunately is not the case with ABAQUS. Then the software was in its infancy and I did not see it relevant to my work, at that stage. COMSOL has since become extremely popular and the greatest attraction to it is the multiphysics features it offers which means that a user can combine structural, thermal, electrical and acoustic analyses in one simulation. This is certainly the future of FE modelling and hence the popularity of COMSOL.

On starting my lectureship, the university that I worked for had only ANSYS as the main FE solver available for FE work. I was then exposed to ANSYS and the ease of use in modelling, with a lot of industry experiences available for its use. A user survey on LinkedIn showed that 61% of FE users prefer ANSYS to others. There is a greater community of users for ANSYS than ABAQUS or COMSOL and this is mainly due to the decades of experienced users in the industry and academia who champion its use. The software continues to evolve and is keeping pace with newer FE offerings.

As to which of them is the best, it is difficult to say. Clearly, a lot of users prefer ANSYS mainly because it is easier to work with due to its rich library of materials which means you can just drag and drop materials into your workspace without thinking too much about the underlying constitutive material behind it. ABAQUS is fantastic for researchers as it offers a lot of flexibility to be innovative in how you undertake your FE work. It is often times a blank canvas and you structure your simulation as original and as expertly as you want, without any presumptions made by the software for you (something I have encountered a few times with ANSYS). COMSOL is coming up leaps and bounds due mainly to its multiphysics future. To determine which of them is best, the jury is still out and you just have to make up your mind which one is 'best' for you.

I intend to make a video about these FE solvers comparisons in future for my Youtube Channel. If you have any thoughts about these or some other software you will like me to include in the comparison, please do let me know via a reply on michael.okereke@cmvideos.org.

Interested in MontCarlGen3D, sign up for product launch mailing list?

I mentioned last week that I am finalizing the packaging and fine-tuning of my next digital product called MontCarlGen3Dv1.0 which will be used for creating random inclusions in 3D representative volume elements.

In the week leading to the launch, I will be sending dedicated emails with information leading towards the launch of the product as well as educational materials and write ups to help you understand the code and explore different case studies in which it can be used.

If you want to keep informed about this, I will suggest you sign up using the link below so that you are informed about this.

Quote of the Week

My quote for the week is taken from a quote attributed to Vince Lombardi, and it goes:

I got exposed to this quote whilst reading Darren Hardy's The Entrepreneur Rollercoaster. Vince Lombardi was famous for helping a lesser known football team - Green Bay Packers, in the 1960s - to three straight and five in total NFL championships in a seven year period. How did he do it, and so consistently over such a short period of time?

The answer lie in the quote above. He got his team to be brilliant at the basics. A lot of time we complicate life by focusing on so many things that are not essential for achieving actual success.

In my career as a university academic and also entrepreneur, I struggle with this as at the core, I am a researcher, and drawn to so many exciting projects which challenge and motivate me. However, I have only a limited time to achieve all of these.

Therefore, I am having to redefine what the basics of academic and business success is all about and try and become brilliant at them. For me these three things are: (a) Continuously working on use computational modelling to solve many material behaviour problems (b) Creating excellent contents that my subscribers like and finally (c) producing digital products that will be helpful to the audience in addressing their computational modelling problems.

I encourage you to do the same. What are those three things you can focus on now to make sure in the long run you are truly successful in your career, research or profession? Those are the basics, work on them!

Thanks for reading so far and I wish you a wonderful weekend. See you next week!