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ManiFEM is a C++ library for solving partial differential equations through the finite element method. The name comes from "finite elements on manifolds". ManiFEM was designed with the goal of coping with very general meshes, in particular meshes on Riemannian manifolds, even manifolds which cannot be embedded in R^3, like the torus R^2/Z^2. Also, maniFEM was written with the goal of being conceptually clear and easy to read. We hope it will be particularly useful for people who want fine control over the mesh, e.g. for implementing their own meshing or remeshing algorithms.
ManiFEM is just a collection of C++ classes. It has no user-friendly interface nor graphic capabilities. The user should have some understanding of programming and of C++. However, maniFEM can be used at a basic level by people with no deep knowledge of C++. Have a look at the gallery. Similar products (competitors), as well as strong and weak points of maniFEM, are listed in the manual, at the end of section 1.
In its current version, release 22.05, maniFEM works well for mesh generation,
including meshes on quotient manifolds.
ManiFEM deals well with one-dimensional meshes (including curves in R^2 and R^3)
and two-dimensional meshes (including surfaces in R^3);
three-dimensional meshes are limited to cubic cells for now.
The user can control variations in the element size;
anisotropic Riemann metrics are object of current work.
Lagrange finite elements of degree one and two are implemented for triangular
and quadrangular cells; many other types of finite elements are still to be implemented.
In the future, variational formulations will be implemented as C++ objects,
thus allowing for compact and elegant code.
A changelog is available at the end of the
manual.
To check which version of maniFEM is installed in your computer, see at the beginning
of the file maniFEM.h.
ManiFEM is being developed by Cristian Barbarosie and Anca-Maria Toader; see also the list of contributors and the colophon.
To learn maniFEM, you should read the manual (version 22.05).
To use maniFEM, choose a release
and download all files to some directory in your computer.
Current code might be unstable; releases are stable.
To check which version of maniFEM is installed in your computer,
see at the beginning of the file maniFEM.h.
To run the examples in the manual, just make run-1.1 for the example in paragraph 1.1,
make run-2.6 for the example in paragraph 2.6, and so on.
Paragraph 11.16 in the manual
gives more details.
You will need a recent C++ compiler (we use g++) and the make utility.
Under linux it should be easy to install them.
It is not that easy to install and use them under Windows, but it is certainly possible,
for instance by using cygwin.
Some examples require the Eigen library;
just copy its source tree somewhere in your computer and be sure that path is mentioned in your
Makefile under the -I flag of your compiler.
You may want to use gmsh for visualization purposes.
A component of maniFEM, MetricTree, can be used independently.
This work is supported by National Funding from FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal), through Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa and Centro de Matemática, Aplicações Fundamentais e Investigação Operacional, project UID/MAT/04561/2020.
Copyright 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 Cristian Barbarosie cristian.barbarosie@gmail.com
ManiFEM is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
ManiFEM is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
Full text of the GNU Lesser General Public License is available in files src/COPYING and src/COPYING.LESSER. It can also be found at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.