Hi! I am trying to use Calculix with some user subroutines from Abaqus. I have seen that UEXTERNALDB is not supported in Calculix. What would be the best way to manage it? I am using the UEXTERNALDB to access some external data and also to make some general calculations affecting the whole model during the analysis.
Thanks a lot!
It really depends on what you want to achieve. But CalculiX is open-source and written mostly in Fortran so you could try modifying the source code for your needs (you have to recompile to use subroutines anyway). However, there might be some ready-made solutions and workarounds for what you want to do.
Exactly, as @Calc_em points out. You can modify the source code to do exactly what you need- I had to write one for calculix a few years ago for a project, and if I recall correctly, the example from Abaqus was beneficial. I only needed to make minor adjustments to calculix sources to ensure I was getting the same variables for the subroutine uexternaldb(lop,lrestart,time,dtime,kstep,kinc). Remember that you must be extremely careful if you plan to use common blocks with calculix. Also, you will not have direct access to some of the friendly available helper functions from Abaqus (getjobname, getoutdir, initialize, etc etc). You will need to take care of those on your own…