Installation

These instructions will get you a copy of planestress up and running on your machine. You will need a working copy of python 3.9, 3.10 or 3.11 to get started.

Installing planestress

planestress uses shapely to prepare the cross-section geometry and gmsh to generate a triangular or rectangular mesh. numpy and scipy are used to aid finite element computations, while matplotlib and rich are used for post-processing. Finally, click is used to power the planestress CLI.

planestress and all of its dependencies can be installed through the python package index:

pip install planestress

Installing PARDISO Solver

The default sparse solver used in scipy is SuperLU. It performs okay for small matrices but appears to be very slow for larger matrices. The PARDISO solver is a much faster alternative (see pypardiso), but it requires the installation of the MKL library, which takes a lot of disk space.

If you do not have a disk space constraint, you can use the PARDISO solver by:

pip install planestress[pardiso]