dolfinx_materials : A Python package for advanced material modelling

dolfinx_materials is a Python add-on package to the dolfinx interface to the FEniCSx project. It enables the user to define complex material constitutive behaviors which are not expressible using classical UFL operators.

• Github repository: https://github.com/bleyerj/dolfinx_materials
• Online documentation: https://bleyerj.github.io/dolfinx_materials/

Features

Current version supports FEniCSx version 0.8.0.

The library supports in particular:

• JAX-based implementations of constitutive relations
• Python-based constitutive relations, using numpy/scipy (slow)
• MFront constitutive behaviors compiled with the generic interface, relying on the MFrontGenericInterfaceSupport project
• constitutive relations based on inference of trained Neural Networks
• constitutive relations solved using external libraries including convex optimization libraries such as cvxpy

Disclaimer: The following functionalities are not currently available but should in theory be possible to implement relatively easily. Contributions are most welcome!

This library should also help you in:

• writing additional interface to other material libraries such as UMATs of Abaqus for instance
• performing multi-scale simulations (FE²) where constitutive update is obtained from the solution of a problem formulated on a RVE.
• implementing data-driven constitutive models

Prerequisites

dolfinx_materials requires:

• FEniCSx (v.0.8), see installation instructions here.
• jax for JAX-based materials. JAX can be simply installed via pip:

pip install jax --user

See JAX installation instructions for more details about GPU acceleration.

Optional for MFront behaviors

• You must install the TFEL project to be able to compile MFront behaviors (.mfront files). In particular, the project requires Boost and Boost-Python libraries.

• The MFrontGenericInterfaceSupport (mgis) package with Python binding must then be installed to load such compiled behaviors within dolfinx.

Installation and usage

Simply clone the dolfinx_materials public repository

https://github.com/bleyerj/dolfinx_materials

and install the package by typing

pip install dolfinx_materials/ --user

License

All this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

Citing

The project can be cited from Zenodo:

@software{bleyer2024dolfinx_materials,
  author       = {Bleyer, Jeremy},
  title        = {{dolfinx\_materials: A Python package for advanced 
                   material modelling}},
  month        = oct,
  year         = 2024,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v0.3.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.13882183},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13882183}
}

Papers related to the MFront and MGIS projects can be cited as:

@article{helfer2020mfrontgenericinterfacesupport,
  title={The MFrontGenericInterfaceSupport project},
  author={Helfer, Thomas and Bleyer, Jeremy and Frondelius, Tero and Yashchuk, Ivan and Nagel, Thomas and Naumov, Dmitri},
  journal={Journal of Open Source Software},
  volume={5},
  number={48},
  pages={1--8},
  year={2020},
  publisher={Open Journals}
}

@article{helfer2015introducing,
  title={Introducing the open-source mfront code generator: Application to mechanical behaviours and material knowledge management within the PLEIADES fuel element modelling platform},
  author={Helfer, Thomas and Michel, Bruno and Proix, Jean-Michel and Salvo, Maxime and Sercombe, J{\'e}r{\^o}me and Casella, Michel},
  journal={Computers \& Mathematics with Applications},
  volume={70},
  number={5},
  pages={994--1023},
  year={2015},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

About the author

Jeremy Bleyer is a researcher in Solid and Structural Mechanics at Laboratoire Navier, a joint research (UMR 8205) of Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Université Gustave Eiffel and CNRS.

{fas}at [email protected]

{fab}linkedin jeremy-bleyer

0000-0001-8212-9921