A macro to send FEM calculation to the cloud

About the development of the FEM module/workbench.

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alexisdlf
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2021 4:05 pm

A macro to send FEM calculation to the cloud

Post by alexisdlf »

Hello everyone,

I am an engineer in thermal design in a cloud computing company called Qarnot. I used FreeCAD to design our water cooling blocks and used the FEM workbench to simulate heat conduction in those blocks. Working in a cloud computing company, it was only natural to use our computing platform to perform all the calculation. Therefore, I made a macro, and it is available here : https://github.com/qarnot/qarnot-freecad-plugin.

The macro uses FreeCAD to write the simulation files, sends these files to the platform, and loads the results when they are done. When working with large simulation, I found it very useful because it saves you time and let you do something else while the simulation is running. Moreover, it also makes it possible to start several simulations at once, for example with different parameters. Using vtk and some more scripting, I was also able to start a bunch of simulations at once and analyze the results automatically. This allows to quickly deduce the compartmental law of a part and opens the way for order model reduction. If you are interested with that, I can also share my code with you

Of course, Qarnot's platform is not free, but the first 15€ are ! That is enough to run hours of computation. I might also add that Qarnot's specificity is to recycle all the heat produced by its server to heat habitations. This is done by embedding our servers directly in heater and boilers that are placed at people's home.

Here is also a tutorial to use the macro : https://blog.qarnot.com/fcmacro/

Feel free to contact me if you have any question or request about the macro. I hope you will find it useful :)

Regards,
Alexis
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