NIST OOF

OOF is designed to help materials scientists calculate macroscopic properties from images of real or simulated microstructures. It reads an image, assigns material properties to features in the image, and conducts virtual experiments to determine the macroscopic properties of the microstructure.

The first version of OOF consisted of two programs, ppm2oof and oof. ppm2oof read images and created a finite element mesh, and oof performed virtual experiments on the mesh. There were two separate versions, one which only solved elasticity problems, and one which solved coupled elasticity and thermal diffusion problems. Those two versions are still available on the OOF1 download page, but they are no longer being supported.

OOF2 improves on OOF1 in a number of ways. Most importantly, OOF2 can solve a much larger variety of physics problems, and can be easily extended to cover even more. For more information, and to download the program, see the OOF2 page.

OOF3D generalizes OOF2 to 3 dimensions, using a stack of 2D images to create a three dimensional microstructure. It includes (or will shortly include) all of the features of OOF2. Eventually we hope to merge OOF2 and OOF3D into a single program.

The programs are written in C++ and Python and benefit from an object-oriented design. The underlying numerical solutions rely on finite element technology. Hence the name OOF, for object-oriented finite element analysis.

In a graphical session :

module load oof
 
oof2

OOF can also be launched in text mode :

module load oof
 
oof2 --text

• http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/oof/