ADINA for Use in Research and Teaching at Universities

ADINA is now widely used at Universities for teaching and research. In the following, some experiences and key points are given for the use of ADINA.

Teaching

In teaching, ADINA is used in courses on finite element methods. ADINA is used in elementary introductory subjects and in advanced subjects. Since ADINA offers modern finite element methods for structures, incompressible and compressible fluid flows, heat transfer, and general multi-physics analysis, the program can be used in a variety of courses on finite element methods. Typically, term projects are completed by the students on University-wide available machines (using ADINA with unlimited number of nodes and elements) and homework is completed using the 900 nodes version on students' laptops or other machines.

In teaching, ADINA is also used in courses not focusing on numerical methods, but to illustrate to the students certain physical behaviors. Instead of performing a laboratory experiment, the numerical simulation of the physical event is shown, and the students can directly ask "what if" questions, like what if the boundary conditions are changed, what if the loading is changed, etc. The numerical simulations directly illustrate the answers to these questions and of course much more can be seen than in a laboratory experiment, because it is possible to look "into" the structure, flow field, and so on. ADINA can be used for this purpose in courses on structural analysis, elasticity, fluid flows, heat transfer, etc. An important point is also that ADINA can be employed very effectively to show the use of hierarchical modeling assumptions of engineering problems, in which first simple mathematical models and then more complex mathematical models are solved. ADINA is here very effectively used because simple to very complex models including multi-physics can be solved.

Research

In research, ADINA is used in mechanics of materials, for example, to implement material models and to analyze micro-structural configurations. The implementation of material models is achieved through the user-defined subroutines.

In research, ADINA is also widely used in the analysis of new designs. Since structures, fluids, heat transfer and the interactions can directly be solved, ADINA is frequently the only analysis tool that can be used to achieve an effective analysis of a design.

In research, ADINA can also be used to compare any new numerical methods development against the techniques available in ADINA. Since ADINA is offering state-of-the-art methods, it can be desirable to compare new numerical methods against those available in ADINA in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

What the University license offers

There is much offered for the use of ADINA, at very low license fees:

• Unlimited usage of ADINA throughout the University with no restriction on the number of University computers used, problem sizes and capabilities.
  
  
• One pre- and post-processor for all analysis types, with solid modeling capabilities based on Parasolid^*.
  
  
• Nastran^** input can be read directly.
  
  
• The theory and formulations used in ADINA follow closely the material in the book Finite Element Procedures by K. J. Bathe.
  
  
• Complementary books on shells and inelastic analysis are: The Finite Element Analysis of Shells — Fundamentals by D. Chapelle and K. J. Bathe; Inelastic Analysis of Solids and Structures by M. Kojic and K. J. Bathe
  
  
• ADINA can be used with the MIT video course by K. J. Bathe.
  
  
• The 900 nodes version of the program is provided that can be freely distributed to and among students. No password is required to run this special version.