Element Variations

[tmfrln]

Abaqus uses a wide range of variations of the standard elements, e.g. for element type C3D10 there are also C3D10R (reduced integration), C3D10T (includes a temperature dof), C3D10H (hybrid formulation). These all have the same node layout, but use different integration schemes, or store additional temperature values. The same argument could be made for e.g. CPS3 and CPE3 (plane stress vs plane strain) as well als CAX3 (axisymmetrical 2d).

I think this is similar to issue #43, but on a more general scale (i.e. specifically adding all these elements would produce a lot of repeating lines of code). I am not aware of how AbaqusReader integrates into JuliaFEM, therefore i am unsure if the additional information beyond the mesh geometry (which could be the same 2d mesh for a plane stress and an axisymmetric analysis) is reused at some point. At least for the geometry, it may be possible to parse the element based on the start of the element string instead of explicitly repeating every variation of the same element.

[TeroFrondelius]

I don't remember, but I think you are right, that we only use geometry. Thus, it could be a good solution to map all different variants to the same topology element and have additional information for example the temperature degrees of freedom. @ahojukka5 what do you think?