Chapter 1. Installation and Running the Program

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Program Internals
Program Input
Program Output
Installing the program
Compiling under Unix
Compiling under Windows
Running the program
PdnMesh Graphical User Interface
File Menu
View Menu
Solve Menu
Popup Menu

Introduction

pdnMesh is a 2 Dimensional finite element analysis program. It can be used to solve Electrostatic, Magneto-static, Heat flow and Fluid dynamic problems. It can also do post processing to visualize the solution. It is possible to import CAD DXF files (ASCII) into pdnMesh and convert them to a format for problem definition. I must confess that being an electrical engineer, I wrote pdnmesh exclusively for electrical engineering problems. So you will see a strong bias towards electrical engineering in the following pages. However, pdnmesh can be used to solve 2D field problems pertaining to other areas.

Let us consider what you need to install pdnmesh. We can list them as follows.

  • GTK and GTKGLExt for the GUI. In Win32, the GUI is written in MFC.

  • LAPACK. Pdnmesh can work without this but if you intend to solve any eigenproblems I strongly recommend installing this.

  • Intel Math Kernel. This is useful if you need to solve eigenproblems under MS Windows. The netlib LAPACK does not support Win32 platforms very well.

  • ARPACK. This is useful if you need to solve very large eigenvalue problems.

Now pdnmesh can run under Win32 platforms. A 100% native GUI using MFC has been written. It is also possible to solve eigenproblems using the Intel Math Kernel library.