STRATOFEM™
An Aeronautical Structural Analysis Software for the linear elastic deformation and stress analysis of 3D shell and solid structures. The executable current version is available free-of-charge.
The software
STRATOFEM™ is an Aeronautical Structural Analysis Finite Element Software. This version of STRATOFEM™ is only for static multi-loadcase analysis, although the modal and random vibration options exist for a future release. As we conceived the code in the 80s to run under MSDOS, it has an out-of-core solver that allows it today to run very large models under limited CPU resources. The executable is currently available, free-of-charge, under CYGWIN only.
How to get it?
You can obtain the software by providing us the name, address and telephone number of the person or institution involved. We will make then the executable available, customized to this user accordingly.
THE HISTORY OF STRATOFEM™
The basic code STRATOFEM™ I originally named it as FEAST (Finite Element Analysis of STructures). I created it between 1989 and 1992 when I had my own company (FEAST Engineering) in the UK.
STRATOFEM™ is a computer code written in FORTRAN IV and 77 and is based on the standard Finite Element Method. It performs static analysis of structures, although a modal analysis and random vibration response version exist. They but have not been incorporated yet.
There is no dedicated Pre and Post processor. I initially linked it to the MENTAT pre-post processor of the MARC FE code. At that time FEAST Engineering had access to the MARC Suite.
It can accept 2D and 3D finite elements plus shell elements. The formulations of these elements are either classical from literature and university notes, or developed during my PhD thesis.
The originality of STRATOFEM™ is that, since I based it on FEAST, it can function with minimal RAM in desktop or portable computers. Because in the 80s the common operating system was Microsoft MS-DOS and the maximum available RAM was 640 KBytes ! Hence it was imperative to use disk storage for the solution matrices of the FE method.
FEAST originally was compiled for 640 KBytes memory and all the storage was diverted to the hard disk through random access files. In this sense, the size of the problem was limited only by the available disk storage. To achieve this, FEAST used an out-of-core block solver to perform Gaussian elimination of the stiffness matrix similar to that published by Prof Bathe in 1976 and then adapted by Dr Kamoulakos.
Today with the very large RAM cheaply available to portable PCs and the emergence of Solid State hard disks with almost instantaneous access, the problem size that STRATOFEM™ (based on FEAST) can handle is practically unlimited.
The user must provide the input in the required ASCII format through his own pre-processor. The default graphical post-processor of STRATOFEM™ is ParaView (www.paraview.org), for which the necessary output is automatically generated in ASCII format, in addition to the STRATOFEM™ standard output.