Object-Oriented Symbolic Derivation and Automatic Programming of Finite Elements in Mechanics

Symbolic approaches to assist in the development of finite element formulations have been used since the late 1970s. Today, symbolic mathematical software such as Mathematica, Maple, etc., has proved to be helpful when testing formulations. In earlier work, the authors introduced a new way of integrating naturally symbolic concepts in numerical finite element codes, taking advantage of an objectoriented code organization. In this paper, we wish to prove on practical examples that the proposed approach is very attractive and promising today, leading to an alternative way of conceiving finite element codes. After presenting a state-of- the-art of symbolic approaches for finite element developments, we first give a practical application of symbolic developments (for discontinuous space-time formulations), and then examples of Computer Aided Software Engineering tools that can be introduced into such a finite element environment.