# Introduction¶

Welcome to these Numerical Tours of Computational Mechanics with FEniCS.

## What is it about ?¶

These numerical tours will introduce you to a wide variety of topics in computational continuum and structural mechanics using the finite element software FEniCS. Many covered topics can be considered as standard and will help the reader in getting started with FEniCS using solid mechanics examples.

Other topics will also be more exploratory and will reflect currently investigated research topics, illustrating the versatility of FEniCS.

The full set of demos can be obtained from the COmputational MEchanics Toolbox (COMET) available at https://gitlab.enpc.fr/jeremy.bleyer/comet-fenics.

A new set of demos illustrating how to couple FEniCS with the MFront code generator have been added. They are based on the mgis.fenics module of the MFrontGenericInterfaceSupport (MGIS) project. A general introduction of the package is available here and the demos source files can be found here. This project has been realized in collaboration with Thomas Helfer (CEA, thomas.helfer@cea.fr).

If you find these demos useful for your research work, please consider citing them using the following Zenodo DOI :

@manual{bleyer2018numericaltours,
title={Numerical Tours of Computational Mechanics with {FE}ni{CS}},
DOI={10.5281/zenodo.1287832},
publisher={Zenodo},
author={Jeremy Bleyer},
year={2018}}


The MGIS project can be cited through the following paper

@article{Helfer2020,
doi = {10.21105/joss.02003},
url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02003},
year = {2020},
publisher = {The Open Journal},
volume = {5},
number = {48},
pages = {2003},
author = {Thomas Helfer and Jeremy Bleyer and Tero Frondelius and
Ivan Yashchuk and Thomas Nagel and Dmitri Naumov},
title = {The MFrontGenericInterfaceSupport project},
journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}
}


## How do I get started ?¶

You can find instructions on how to install FEniCS on the FEniCS project website http://fenicsproject.org. In the following numerical tours, we will use the Python interface for the different FEniCS scripts. These demos are compatible with FEniCS 2018.1.0 but many should work with older versions after minor changes.

FEniCS is also distributed along with an important number of documented or undocumented examples, some of them will be revisited in these tours but do not hesitate over looking at other interesting examples.

In the following, we will assume that readers possess basic knowledge of FEniCS commands. In particular, we advise you to go first through the documentation and tutorials https://fenicsproject.org/tutorial/ if this is not the case.