Finite Element Analysis (FEA): CalculiX

Good morning,

I wanted to share a great piece of software for Finite Element Analysis, which usually refers to structural solvers. I am using it to verify whether certain structures subjected to certain loads safely operate within displacement and yield stress criterion. I am using it for a prototype of an invention of mine, which I am excited to finally be close to building. This prototype is a result of CFD and FEA analysis. Anyway, the website for CalculiX provides all of the software and helpful installation guides and tutorials.

I also wanted to share a troubleshooting tip for the CalculiX CrunchiX (CCX). Calculix has two components: the GUI and the solver. These are named CalculiX GraphiX (CGX) and CalculiX CrunchiX (CCX). I was getting the following error when trying to use the already-compiled provided CCX executable on the CalculiX website:

ccx: error while loading shared libraries: libgfortran.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I did not have libgfortran.so.2, but I did have libgfortran.so.3. I verified this by:

locate libgfortran.so.3

Using the directory location output from the above command, I linked the .so.3 to .so.2 by:

sudo   ln   -s   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgfortran.so.3   /usr/lib/libgfortran.so.2

And then my executable no longer had the aforementioned error...

HOWEVER, I kept getting other errors. I could do one of two things... Try to install the package that had libgfortran.so.2, or compile CalculiX from source. Since the package containing libgfortran.so.2 is deemed obsolete by the Ubuntu developers, I could not find and install it easily. So, I decided to compile CalculiX from source, and I successfully did so. I will create another post for details.