MiniFEM

Description

This page is created to showcase and exchange the use of MiniFEM and its accessories. Reporting bugs, leaving comments, and sharing cool application cases are warmly welcomed!

MiniFEM was originally developed to generate various stress tensor fields for my stress visualization project (3D-TSV). With sporadic efforts, now it has become a full-featured FEM package for elasticity simulation, and serving as a bridge among my different research-oriented projects. In short, it's not only a dataset generator but also a testbed for my elasticity simulation works.

MiniFEM is a MATLAB-only implementation, and its usage follows a command-line style. By simple running the gate-script "./MiniFEM/src/MiniFEM.m", one can create the FEM model via different ways. Upon this, various simulation tasks can be conducted by calling the corresponding functions in "./MiniFEM/src/APP/".

Being aware that MiniFEM is just a personal project, and its expected users are students who are taking FEM-related courses or researchers who occasionally need to use FEM for their research activities. For advanced FEM tasks, one should resort to the widely verified implementations.

Updates

• 2025-07-13: Page is created.

What can MiniFEM do?

• Conduct simulations of static deformation, stress analysis, (fast) frequency sweep, modal analysis, and transient analysis. ✔️
• Support first-order planar (triangular/quadrilateral), solid (tetrahedral/hexahedral), 3D truss, and beam finite elements. ✔️
• Enable limited multi-material simulation under the "Perfect Bonding" assumptions. ✔️
• Provide visualization options for different simulation tasks and partially support GPU acceleration for CG solver. ✔️

Data Format

• MiniFEM defines a general ASCII file (.MiniFEM) to convey FEM models of various element types, including domain type (Plane, Solid, or Frame), element type (Quadrilateral, Triangular, Hexahedral, Tetrahedral, Beam3D, or Truss3D), element order (1st-order ONLY), mesh info (vertices, elements), loads and fixations (optional), material indicator behind each element.
• The *.MiniFEM datasets can be created through the provided GUIs ("./MiniFEM/src/ApplyBC_2D.m" or ".../ApplyBC_3D.m"), it works by importing the mesh dataset and then applying for boundary conditions interactively.
• MiniFEM supports I/O of the stress dataset (.TSV) that is used in the stress visualization project 3D-TSV.
• MiniFEM supports loading the FEM model in *.TopVoxel format, which is used in SGLDBench, for a comprehensive evaluation (Note that MiniFEM does not work with large FEM models as SGLDBench does, e.g., > 10M DOFs on 64 GB RAM )

Demonstration Cases

Case 2: Evaluating topology-optimized result

Contexts: One can investigate how topology-optimized results under static loads affect the dynamic features of the original domain by comparing the 1st-order natural frequency and the corresponnding modal mode of different designs through the Modal Analysis functionality of MiniFEM.

Case 1: Basic functions demonstration

Contexts: Taking the provided hexahedral mesh dataset, showing the basic functionalities of MiniFEM.