I went into the mesh

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Peter Grosse meshed from fine to coarse with Gmsh (upper) and calculated in Calculix (lower)
My picture meshed from fine to coarse with Gmsh (upper) and calculated in Calculix (lower)

A post from Diego Magela Lemos on LinkedIn got me. He used the great work from Prof. Christophe Geuzaine to create a mesh from a picture in Gmsh. I already used Gmsh before to convert meshes and so I could not resist to mesh my own image. And I started thinking about calculating it with FEM.

So I downloaded the latest version of Gmsh from the website and followed the description from Diego Magela Lemos Blog. Following figure shows Gmsh with the meshed picture.

Meshed picture in Gmsh
Meshed picture in Gmsh

In Gmsh you can directly Export a mesh as “Abaqus INP (*.inp)” and that is compatible to Calculix / PrePoMax. In PrePoMax you can directly import the mesh and work directly on the mesh. I tried a quad mesh.

Quad mesh in PrePoMax with BCs and Loads
Quad mesh in PrePoMax with BCs and Loads

I used a Concentrated Force to add a force on every node. So finer meshed details (dark areas) get more force and coarser areas get lesser force in Z direction. The calculated deformation in Z direction looks like an artwork in PrePoMax.

Displacement result plot in PrePoMax with color spectrum type Grayscale
Displacement result plot with color spectrum type Grayscale

I have not yet found a way to display and save the results automatically in PrePoMax. So I learned something about CalculiX GraphiX (cgx) to get some plots for a new animation direct from the Calculix frd result file.

Mesh and deformed results of a picture animated with CalculiX GraphiX (cgx)
Mesh and deformed results animated with CalculiX GraphiX (cgx)

I could have somehow calculated a fatigue utilization. But that doesn’t make any sense here. But how much fun can you have with only free and opensource tools.