Application fields of Elmer

Elmer development started out mainly with computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer in the mid-1990s. The first applications were the modeling of the Czochralski growth of silicon crystals and the flow of pulp in paper machinery.

However, quite early Elmer development started to strive for being a physics-oblivious library that only links to particular physical modules in run-time. As the finite element method is very suitable for a large class of different problems, Elmer gradually became a multiphysical code suited to large variety of different problems. Over the years there have been projects related to the simulation of blood flow, microscale acoustics, fluid mechanics of glaciers, electrical machines and transformers, microwave heating, permafrost, etc.

The current user community is quite evenly distributed over the different main branches of computational mechanics: heat transfer, solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, electromagnetics. Of these features computational electromagnetics has recently been developing most rapidly.

The future is difficult to predict. The development of Elmer is strongly guided by the project portfolio of the development team. New ideas and collaboration opportunities are always welcome!