Sofea is a small computer program used to conduct finite element analyses. The program is developed as part of a 4th year undergraduate project at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Strathclyde. The project began in 2001 with the aim of exploring how object-oriented programming techniques could be used to write an FEA program capable of carrying out probabilistic analyses on a parallel computer. The programming language chosen for Sofea was C++ since it provides both object-oriented and low-level features.
The project advisor for the development of Sofea is Dr Tugrul Comlekci who has had a longstanding interest in both programming and finite element analysis. The students that have so far participated in Sofea's development are
The current version of Sofea provides a command-line interface where commands and comma separated arguments are used to create and analyse finite element models. The program can also be run in batch mode in which case it will conduct an analysis by reading commands from an input file. Currently only four 2-D element types are provided since the project emphesis is on probabilistic analysis/design and parallel processing. It is possible to allow for stochastic variation of virtually any aspect of a finite element model through the use of user defined variables. The parallelization of the probabilistic system is underway.
The source-code for the current version of Sofea was developed on a laptop computer running Mandrake Linux 8.2 and Microsoft Windows 2000. It has also been successfully compiled (using gcc 3.2.3) and run on an 8-node Beowulf cluster running Red Hat Linux 7.3.