Overview

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 kinds of material knowledge:

• material properties (for instance the Young’s modulus, the thermal conductivity, etc.)
• mechanical behaviours. Numerical performance of generated mechanical behaviours were given a particular attention. Various benchmarks show that MFront implementations are competitive with native implementations available in the Cast3M, Code-Aster, Abaqus Standard and Cyrano3 solvers.
• simple point-wise models, such as material swelling used in fuel performance codes.

A set of interfaces are provided for various solvers:

• the Cast3M finite element solver. This interface is described here.
• the Code_Aster finite element solver. This interface is described here
• the Abaqus Standard finite element solver. This interface is described here.
• the Abaqus Explicit finite element solver. This interface is described here.
• the CalculiX finite element solver. This interface is described here.
• the ANSYS Mechanical APDL finite element solver. This interface is described here.
• the ZeBuLoN finite element solver. This interface is described here.
• the TMFFT and the AMITEX_FFTP Fast Fourier Transform solvers developed internally at CEA. Note that AMITEX_FFTP is distributed under a free license for research and education purpose. Those solvers reuse the interface developed for the Cast3M finite element solver.

For material properties, various interfaces are also provided and cover the following languages: C, C++, python, fortran, etc.

History

• Versions prior to 0.1 were developed by T. Helfer as an independent project.
• Starting with version 1.0, TFEL was developed as a sub-project of the PLEIADES platform.
• Versions higher than 2.0 are open-source and distributed under the GPL license with linking exception.

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. Since 2023, the linking exception clause was added to the GPL licence.

Copyright (C) 2006-2013 CEA/DEN. All rights reserved. Copyright (C) 2014-2025 CEA/DEN, EDF R&D. All rights reserved.