OOF: Finite Element Analysis of Microstructures

Preface

Preface

Table of Contents

Version

ppm2oof, together with its companion program oof, [1] is a numerical tool for investigating the properties of a material, given an image of its microstructure and the constitutive properties of its microstructural components. These programs were intended to help materials scientists explore the behavior of microstructures--however, we hope that our software may prove to be useful in applications that we cannot imagine.

The OOF suite is public domain. Anyone can download it and use it on any computer where it can be compiled. Information about how to download the software,join our mailing list, or to contact the OOF team can be found at the OOF website: http://www.ctcms.nist.gov/oof.

OOF was, and still is, being developed at NIST, as a joint project of the Information Technology and Material Science and Engineering Laboratories, and MIT's Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. It is supported by the NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science and the US Department of Energy's Advanced Turbine Systems Program, under contract DE-A101-99EE41381.

We have benefitted enormously from user suggestions. Thanks go to Chun-hway Hsueh, Venkat Vedula, André Zimmerman, Anil Saigal, Mark Locatelli, Nita Parekh, and too many others to list.

Happy OOFing from the OOF team: Steve Langer, Edwin Fuller, Andrew Roosen, and Andrew Reid at NIST; and W. Craig Carter and R. Edwin Garcia-Muñoz at MIT.

Version

This manual is up-to-date for version 1.1.18 of ppm2oof.



[1] OOF originally stood for Object-Oriented Finite Elements. However, because some (ok, at least one) of the creators are shameless egotists, we now believe it is a perfectly fine new word ripe for the inclusion into scientific lexicon:

OOF, n.
  1. (largely onomatopoetic) An epigetic sound typically coinciding with the lifting of a large object or an unexepected variation in one's inertia: ``Oof! What have you got in here, a baby walrus?''

  2. A software program for performing virtual experiments from data in image format.

OOF, vt. (oofed, oofing)
  1. To change an image into a virtual result via the oof program, ``I've oofed that picture that you gave me and I think you have a real problem,'' ``Oh, I was oofing things all day and forgot that it was our anniversary--um, how do like this picture of a dozen roses?''

It is also fun to say--try it: "Oof." "Oof?" "Oof!!!", "a--oo-oof, oooh."