Calculix

Calculix is a free and open source finite element analysis application that uses a similar input format to Abaqus. It has an implicit and explicit solver (CCX) written by Guido Dhondt and a pre and post processor (CGX) written by Klaus Wittig. The original software was written for the Linux operating system. Convergent Mechanical has ported the application to the Windows operating system.

The pre processor component of Calculix can generate grid data for the Computational Fluid Dynamics programs duns, ISAAC and OpenFOAM. It can also generate input data for the commercial FEM programs Nastran, Ansys and Abaqus. The pre processor can also generate mesh data from STL files.

There is an active community online that provides support via a Yahoo! discussion group. Convergent Mechanical also provides installation support for their extended version of CalculiX for Windows.

There is a friendly CalculiX Launcher (binary only) with CCX wizard for both Windows and Linux.

The CalculiX solver is available on the Sun Grid.

A Python library, pycalculix, was written to automate the creation of Calculix models in the Python programming language. The library provides Python access to building, loading, meshing, solving, and querying Calculix results for 2D models. Pycalculix was written by Justin Black. Examples and tutorials are available on the pycalculix site.