A Matlab based program for the analysis of axisymmetric shells

Achilleas Filippidis and Adam J. Sadowski

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, UK

AQUINAS is a specialised MATLAB finite element (FE) toolbox for the nonlinear analysis of axisymmetric thin-walled shell systems, conceived by the Authors to recover a research functionality once widely available but now largely lost in the age of supposedly 'general' 3D FE software. AQUINAS exploits the powerful built-in sparse linear algebra routines of MATLAB with efficient matrix assembly in pre-compiled and parallelised C++ code via the MEX functionality, as well as MATLAB's extensive visualisation and quality-of-life features. In addition to making nonlinear bifurcation buckling calculations of axisymmetric shells more accessible to a wider research community, the toolbox is designed to facilitate the ongoing active development of the structural Eurocode EN 1993-1-6 governing the design of metal civil engineering shells through its capability to automate the accurate computation of nominal resistance capacity curves for reference axisymmetric shell systems.

AQUINAS has been developed and tested on a MATLAB R2022a coding environment. Earlier versions of MATLAB may not be supported. Only the base MATLAB installation is required, with no dependency on any of MATLAB's toolboxes. Pre-compiled binaries .mexw64 and .mexa64 are included for Windows and Linux operating systems.

MinGW-w64 6.3 (for OpenMP 4.5 support) is required for compilation of the C++ code into MATLAB's MEX binaries. This can be installed through MATLAB's Add-Ons manager. Maple (2019 or later) can be used for automatic generation of the scripts (both for MATLAB and C++ assembly versions) responsible for computation of the stiffness coefficients. This is optional and can be done manually if a Maple license is unavailable.

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