Welcome to xfemm

Welcome to the xfemm project. xfemm is a software project intended to create a direct interface to a high quality magnetics finite element code based on FEMM. The objective of xfemm is to create a cross-platform command line magnetics finite element solver written in standard C++, a set of magnetics problem definition and post-processing functions in native Matlab/Octave code, and a mex interface to the solvers

NOTE TO USERS

If you use xfemm, particularly for industrial work, but also academic, it will be greatly appreciated if you could write an email stating this and how it has supported your work. This is a low-cost way to ensure further development and maintenance will continue! Contact the authors on the discussion forum, or you will find an email address in the source files.

If you wish to cite xfemm in your work, please use the following:

Crozier, R, Mueller, M., "A New MATLAB and Octave Interface to a Popular Magnetics Finite Element Code", Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Electric Machines (ICEM 2016), September 2016.

We would also suggest you cite the original FEMM program.

Installation and Setup

There are two ways to make use of the xfemm project. One is to use it as a collections of standalone programs run from the command line. The other is to use it through the Matlab/Octave programming language.

The standalone programs are fmesher and fsolver. There is also a library of post-processing functions called fpproc, but no standalone program interface is provided to this at this time, you will have to create your own (note that the Matlab/Octave interface does, however, provide full access to fpproc).

Compiling Standalone Binary Programs

Released versions of xfemm come with pre-built binaries. But if you want to compile xfemm on your platform, you can do so quite easily with cmake and your compiler of choice. Run cmake on the CMakeLists.txt in the cfemm directory to create the build system, and then build the project. On Linux this would be done as

cd <install dir>/xfemm/cfemm
cmake .
make

the binary files are found in the xfemm/cfemm/bin directory

Side-note: Compiling with an external triangle

Xfemm ships with triangle 1.6 by Jonathan Shewchuk of the Carnegie Mellon University, which was released in 2005. There is a newer (unofficial) version available, that also incorporates the aCute mesher developed at the University of Florida, Gainesville. This version has the main goal "to turn Triangle into a re-usable library and the introduction of a simplified C API."

You can get the new triangle code here: https://github.com/wo80/Triangle

If you install the external triangle to a standard location (e.g. /usr/local), xfemm will automatically pick it up. You can notice this by the line "Found triangle " when you run cmake. If you install the external triangle in a different location, you'll need to tell cmake where to find it:

cd <install dir>/xfemm/cfemm
cmake . -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<triangle install dir>
make

Compiling Matlab Interface

Detailed instructions for compiling the Matlab inteface can be found in the README file provided in the mfemm directory. The process is fairly well automated.