PrePoMax – news (release 1.4 and 1.5)

Hi, welcome to you after a short break, hopefully I will now get back to posting regularly 🙂 While writing article PrePoMax – the best open source FEA software? I tried to answer this question and I am still not sure of the answer. However, I can write with certainty that PrePoMax is currently the fastest growing open-source FEA project. Since February when I wrote about the programme two more versions have been released and they introduce a lot of new features to the programme.

Release 1.4

This version added support for dynamic analyses (previously available in the Calculix solver) to PrePoMax. Two linear dynamic analyses: modal dynamics and steady state dynamics, and two non-linear dynamic analyses: dynamic implicit and dynamic explicit. In a cool and accessible way, all these analyses were presented by FEAnalyst on his youtube channel. Tutorials numbered 35-38.

Release 1.5

Still in development. It introduces a long-awaited feature, the ability to create hex meshes, thanks to the integration into the PrePoMax mesher GMSH. I wrote briefly about Gmsh in my first blog article, it is one of the two most known, appreciated and used open-source mesher. In previous versions of PrePoMax, it was possible to import meshes from Gmsh, but the operation of this is not as convenient as that introduced in the latest release of PrePoMax. The program’s author Matej Borovinšek has posted several tutorials on his youtube channel demonstrating the use of these features.

Version compatibility

By the way, an important note on file compatibility between versions. If you have a project that you created in an older version of the programme (e.g. 1.3.5), you may have problems opening it in a newer release (1.4.1). For this reason, if we have any PrePoMax projects it is a good idea to keep the release in which we made it and install new releases in parallel. This problem should not affect sub-releases i.e. a project from version 1.4.0 should work in version 1.4.1.