SMTK User’s Guide

The Simulation Modeling Tool Kit, or SMTK, is a framework to help you (1) describe a model in enough detail that it can be passed to a solver and (2) create input files for a variety of solvers in different simulation packages using your description.

This process can involve any or all of the following:

  • importing a geometric model of the simulation domain or the domain’s boundary;

  • assigning sizing functions to specify mesh element size for analysis;

  • submitting portions of the simulation domain to be meshed for analysis;

  • assigning material properties to regions of the simulation domain;

  • assigning boundary conditions to portions of the simulation domain’s boundary;

  • assigning initial conditions to portions of the simulation domain or its boundary; and

  • assigning global simulation properties such as convergence criteria.

SMTK provides an attribute resource that can represent arbitrarily structured data and a template system that can be tailored to describe almost any simulation’s expected inputs without allowing spurious or invalid input specifications. Thus, in addition to the process above, SMTK provides a way for simulation packages to expose settings to domain experts that makes preparing valid inputs simple.

SMTK also provides a uniform interface to several different solid modeling kernels for preparing discretizations of your simulation domain.