ADINA in Teaching

ADINA is now used at many Universities for teaching and research. In the following, some experiences and key points are given for the use of ADINA in teaching. Note that a 3-months free trial usage is offered.

Teaching Finite Element Methods

ADINA is used in courses on finite element methods — 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 problems, ADINA can be used in a variety of courses on finite element methods. In such courses, typically, homework is completed using the freely available 900 nodes version on students' laptops or other machines, and term projects are completed by the students on University-wide available machines (using ADINA with unlimited number of nodes and elements).

Teaching Mechanics

ADINA is also used in courses not focusing on numerical methods, but to illustrate to the students certain physical behaviors in "virtual experiments" of solids and fluids. 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 geometry is changed. The numerical simulations directly illustrate the answers to these questions. ADINA can be used in "virtual experiments" in courses on structural analysis, elasticity, fluid flows, heat transfer, etc.

Analysis in Design

ADINA is particularly suited for stress, heat flow, mass transfer,..., analysis of designs: in preliminary design, simple models are solved; then, as the design progresses, the analysis models become more complex — all with the use of the same graphical user interface.

What the University license offers

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

• 3-months free trial usage (if ordered before August 1, 2007)

• 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; the Solutions Manual to the Exercises in the book is also available! (send requests to kjb@mit.edu)

• 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.

• 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.