About

AFEM is a “fit-for-purpose” engineering development toolkit designed to support the use of high-order structural analysis during the early phases of aircraft conceptual design. As a development toolkit, it provides the engineer with a flexible, modular, and extensible library of components and tools to rapidly build a useful structural model. It is not an end-user GUI application, but rather a library enabling engineers to rapidly build their own application specific tools and processes, encoding their own design rules and best practices along the way.

Although AFEM targets airframe design and analysis applications, really only the afem.structure and afem.oml packages directly support that cause. All the other packages provide a more general and “Pythonic” set of entities and tools that could potentially be used to develop applications in other disciplines and/or domains.

Technology Stack

The AFEM core technology stack includes:

  • Python: The Python programming language enables rapid development and integration with other systems.

  • OpenCASCADE: This mature library provides advanced geometric modeling and CAD functionality and is under active development.

  • Netgen: This library enables advanced meshing capabilities including 3-D tetrahedral and 2-D unstructured quad-dominated surface meshing.

  • Salome Platform: The core meshing library from this open source application serves as the central component for AFEM’s mesh generation capabilities.

  • pyOCCT: This open source project provides Python bindings to the OpenCASCADE and Salome Platform meshing libraries.