I am just getting started

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I want to automate simulations with a full solution using python to modify the input files so I got wsl2 running on my windows machine and I setup CUDA so I can use Pastix for GPU acceleration and was lanning to use paraview for visualization. problem i that I am way out of my waters and I don’t know what I am doing 90% of the time and I need help

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Welcome to CalculiX!

If it is any consolation; we all started like this at some point. :slight_smile:

What I would suggest is to look at some examples, e.g. CalculiX-Examples. It contains examples of the first workflow mentioned below.
And I sure wish this had been available when I started my CalculiX journey!

There are many different workflows possible with CalculiX. Some examples.

  1. Generate geometry and meshes with cgx and use ccx for the calculation. This is the workflow I use most because it is (in my experience) the easiest to make variations and to automate. I like to use make to tie the different steps together. This is also easy to keep under revision control because all the input files are plain text.
  2. Use gmsh for geometry and meshing and ccx for the calculation. Note that getting a good hex mesh out of gmsh can be a challenge.
  3. Use a CAD program to generate geometry, gmsh to mesh it and ccx to run the analysis. Automating this can be hard, depending how large the changes to the CAD model are for each iteration.
  4. Use FreeCAD to generate geometry and its FEM workbench (which uses ccx under the hood) to run the analysis. This is probably most like you the graphical frontends you find in other FEA software. I haven’t used this much. You could script this with Python but I haven’t tried it.

The workflows (1) and (2) are relatively easy to automate. The others not so much.

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