Obstacles degrees of freedom

[sdast9]

I appreciate the additions on the volumes that you made last night. A thought that I had in addition was whether it would be easy to add a feature to free some of the degrees of freedom of obstacles similar to assigning dimension= [true, false, false]. I would be happy to give it a shot if it is easy enough and you can point me to the most critical place in the code.

Also, if there is anything else I can do that is helpful (test features, etc.), please just let me know. I don't want to be a pest, but would love to support your efforts in whatever way possible.

[zfergus]

Interesting idea. Obstacles are not simulated so they would not deform and we do not have an elasticity model for shells either. I assume that in this case, you expect the obstacles to move rigidly?

Adding this would almost require adding rigid body dynamics into PolyFEM. That is doable but might be a lot of work.

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If you are interested, we created a new PR (#91) which aims to add at least one test case per physics/PDE in PolyFEM. Most of them just require creating a JSON example.

[sdast9]

Thanks so much. Your response makes sense. Yes, I was interested in relatively unconstrained rigid body motion and collisions with deformable objects. I believe febio has that capability (although their contact implementation has some limitations) and I haven't looked closely at the rigid stuff stuff here, but if the physics aren't already in place, then that sounds like a low priority item. I'm traveling today, but I will check out your updates and suggestion tomorrow when I'm back in the office. My group would likely want to publish using your work in the future. If it is better for us to simply cite your project or establish a more formal collaboration, we are open whatever is more helpful for you.

[danielepanozzo]

I would be happy to discuss over a zoom call your use case and see if we can steer our research to better support your project. If you want to chat, can you send me an email to panozzo@nyu.edu to organize the call? Looking forward!