Description

TFEL is a collaborative development of CEA and EDF.

MFront is a code generator which translates a set of closely related domain specific languages into plain C++ on top of the TFEL library. Those languages cover three kind of material knowledge:

• material properties (for instance the Young modulus, the thermal conductivity, etc.)
• mechanical behaviours. Numerical performances of generated mechanical behaviours was given a particular attention. MFront offers a variety of interfaces to finite element solvers Cast3M, Code-Aster, EUROPLEXUS, Abaqus-Standard, Abaqus-Explicit, Zebulon, etc. or various FFT solvers such as AMITEX_FFTP. Various benchmarks shows that MFront implementations are competitive with native implementations available in the Cast3M, Code-Aster and Cyrano3 solvers.
• simple point-wise models, such as material swelling used in fuel performance codes.

MFront comes with a handy easy-to-use tool called MTest that can test the local behaviour of a material, by imposing independent constraints on each component of the strain or the stress. This tool has been much faster (from ten to several hundred times depending on the test case) than using a full-fledged finite element solver.

Licences

TFEL version prior to 0.1 were released under both the LGPL and the CECILL-B licences. A copy of those licences are included in the distributions of TFEL.

TFEL versions 1.x were developed by CEA within the PLEIADES project. Since svn revision 584, TFEL was part of the PLEIADES project.

Starting from versions 2.x, TFEL has been publicly released under either the GPL or the CECILL-A licence. A copy of those licences are delivered with the sources of TFEL. CEA or EDF may also distribute this project under specific licensing conditions.

Copyright (C) 2006-2013 CEA/DEN. All rights reserved. Copyright (C) 2014-2015 CEA/DEN, EDF R&D. All rights reserved.

How to cite TFEL/MFront

If you use TFEL/MFront in your research, please cite the following paper:

@article{helfer_introducing_2015,
	title = {Introducing the open-source mfront code generator: Application to mechanical behaviours and material knowledge management within the {PLEIADES} fuel element modelling platform},
	volume = {70},
	issn = {0898-1221},
	url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0898122115003132},
	doi = {10.1016/j.camwa.2015.06.027},
	shorttitle = {Introducing the open-source mfront code generator},
	pages = {994--1023},
	number = {5},
	journaltitle = {Computers \& Mathematics with Applications},
	shortjournal = {Computers \& Mathematics with Applications},
	author = {Helfer, Thomas and Michel, Bruno and Proix, Jean-Michel and Salvo, Maxime and Sercombe, Jérôme and Casella, Michel},
	urldate = {2016-09-22},
	date = {2015-09},
	keywords = {Domain specific languages, Implicit integration schemes, Material knowledge management, Mechanical behaviour integration, Single crystal plasticity},
}

Current versions

The latest official version is TFEL-4.2.0. It is built upon the C++-17 standard.

The stable development branch is called rliv-4.2. It is the recommended branch for most users.

The current master branch will become TFEL-5.0.