FEBio — The Complete Guide: Free Finite Elements for Biomechanics and Soft Materials
FEBio is a finite element package developed in laboratories at the University of Utah and Columbia University, with funding from the US National Institutes of Health. It was built from the start for biomechanics and soft materials, and its source code is distributed under the MIT licence.
FEBio
University of Utah / Columbia University
FEA for biomechanics and soft materials — hyperelastic, viscoelastic and tissue-implant contact.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Tissue material models — hyperelastic, viscoelastic and poroelastic (biphasic), which most general-purpose solvers lack.
- Contact — tissue on tissue and tissue on a metal implant.
- Large deformation — nonlinear analysis suited to materials that stretch by tens of percent.
- FEBio Studio — a graphical interface to build a model, run it and view results.
- Plugins — a plugin mechanism for adding your own material models and features.
Who it suits
Biomedical engineering: orthopaedic implant design, cartilage and joint research, blood vessels and soft tissue. A mechanical engineer working with steel and concrete will be better served by a general solver; FEBio stands out when the material itself is the hard part.
Related tools
For general mechanical analysis with an interface — PrePoMax with CalculiX. For musculoskeletal motion simulation — OpenSim. For advanced result visualisation — ParaView.
OpenSim
Stanford University
Musculoskeletal modelling and movement simulation, from Stanford University.
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PrePoMax
University of Maribor
Full graphical front end for CalculiX — meshing, materials, loads and results in one window.
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CalculiX
CalculiX Project
Open-source FEA with syntax close to Abaqus. The solver behind the FreeCAD FEM workbench.
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ParaView
Kitware / Sandia / Los Alamos
Large-scale simulation post-processing — slices, streamlines and animation.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
FEBio is the leading free finite element tool for biomechanics, with material models that general-purpose programs simply do not have.