FElupe — The Complete Guide: Free Analysis of Rubber Parts and Large Deformations in Python
FElupe is an open-source Python library for finite-element analysis of solid bodies, specialising in hyperelastic materials and large deformations. It is especially suited to rubber and elastomer parts — an area where ordinary linear solvers are simply not enough.
FElupe
Andreas Dutzler
A Python finite-element library for nonlinear solid mechanics — rubber, elastomers and large deformations.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Hyperelastic materials — Neo-Hooke, Mooney-Rivlin and other models, including nearly incompressible materials.
- Geometric nonlinearity — large deformations and rotations, solved in load steps.
- Built-in meshes — cubes, cylinders and rectangles in one line, or import a mesh from an external tool.
- Ready load cases — for example uniaxial tension or compression for material calibration.
- Result display — plots from Python and export for viewing in visualisation programs.
How to start
Install it with pip on any operating system and start from one of the documentation examples — such as compressing a rubber block. Change the part dimensions and material parameters, and check force against displacement. You need basic familiarity with Python and continuum mechanics.
Related tools
For writing free-form weak forms in Python — scikit-fem. For structural analysis with a graphical interface — PrePoMax. For viewing the results in 3D — ParaView.
scikit-fem
Tom Gustafsson and contributors
A lightweight Python library for assembling and solving finite-element problems, with few dependencies and many examples.
Get it from the vendor
PrePoMax
University of Maribor
Full graphical front end for CalculiX — meshing, materials, loads and results in one window.
Get it from the vendor
ParaView
Kitware / Sandia / Los Alamos
Large-scale simulation post-processing — slices, streamlines and animation.
Get it from the vendor
Python
Python Software Foundation
The language behind most modern engineering computation, and its full ecosystem.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
FElupe is a free, modern and well-maintained tool for analysing rubber parts — work that usually requires expensive commercial software.