Elmerpost Help

A Short Intro to Elmerpost

Elmerpost is a program for displaying results from FEM analyses, primarily from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The program has been (or rather is being) developed at Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) as a part of the Elmer project, which itself is a part of the Finnish national CFD Technology Programme by the Technology Development Centre of Finland (TEKES).

Elmerpost is mostly coded in C-language using primarily two tool packages outside of it's own code: OpenGL graphics library which can be replaced by the freely distributable library called Mesa , and the TCL/TK package for user interface tools. The Elmerpost code and the tools used make this package usable in virtually any UNIX/X-environment. The tested environments are: Linux, SGI IRIX, HPUX and DEC Unix. Windows NT/Windows95 - version has also been tested and is working.

Elmerpost data display styles include:

• Color coded mesh display
• Isocountour line display
• Isosurface display
• Vector display
• Sphere display
• Particle advection and streamline display

There are also several additional features:

• A matrix language MATC, which can be used to manipulate data with
  • Basic matrix and vector operations
  • Dynamically sizeable variables
  • A programming language with functions, flow control, loops, I/O, etc.
  • Derivative operators for the finite element model: gradient, divergence, and curl
• Both a graphical and command line user interface
• The TCL/TK environment can be used to full extent, providing a programmable user interface tool to extend the program to specific needs
• Arbitrary cuts may be extracted from a 3D model
• Colormap editor, surface material editor, background color editor
• Unlimited number of user controllable views of the model
• A versatile clipping ability
• Some basic element grouping ability (at the moment not very effective use is made of this ability)
• Online help in HTML format (a simple basic HTML browser is also included)

Here are some example pictures made with Elmerpost: Picture Gallery . To get more information and obtain the sofware contact Juha Ruokolainen at CSC.

Using Elmerpost

Below are specific instructions for using Elmerpost. This is not complete as yet, please be patient with me.

Topics

• File Menu
  • File Format
• Edit Menu
  • Colormap Editor
  • Grouping
  • Material Editor
  • Background Color Editor
  • Time Step Control
  • Math Module Window
  • Stop Processing
  • Camera Settings
  • Object Clip Planes
• Display Menu
  • Mesh Lines
  • Color Mesh
  • Countour Lines
  • Contour Surfaces and Model Cuts
  • Vector Display
  • Particle Dispaly
  • Shepre Display
  • Color Scale Display
• MATC Matrix Language
• Controlling transformations