chfem, which stands for Computational Homogenization with the image-based Finite Element Method, is a software written in C and CUDA, wrapped in Python, for the computational homogenization of material samples characterized via $\mu$-CT. As it is, the effective properties that can be evaluated are:

• Thermal conductivity $\rightarrow$ $\kappa\nabla^{2}u=0$
• Linear elasticity $\rightarrow$ $\nabla\cdot\mathbf{C}\nabla\mathbf{u}=0$
• Permeability $\rightarrow$ $\mu\nabla^{2}\mathbf{u}-\nabla p+\mathbf{b}=0$ ; $\nabla\cdot\mathbf{u} -\tau p=0$

The program follows a lightweight matrix-free approach to image-based finite element analysis, exploring GPU resources with CUDA to achieve significant performance gains. Our end goal is to be able to run large problems ($10^9$ DOFs) with relatively acessible graphics cards. Following is a visualization of the output from a permeability simulation.

If you use chfem in your research, please use the following BibTeX entries to cite our paper:

@article{toolkit2023,
    title = {Simulation toolkit for digital material characterization of large image-based microstructures},
    author = {Pedro C.F. Lopes and Rafael S. Vianna and Victor W. Sapucaia and Federico Semeraro and Ricardo Leiderman and André M.B. Pereira},
    journal = {Computational Materials Science},
    volume = {219},
    pages = {112021},
    year = {2023},
    publisher={Elsevier}
}

Developed at the Laboratório de Computação Científica, Universidade Federal Fluminense (LCC-UFF). Niterói, Brazil.

There are two repositories for this project, a development one on Gitlab and a mirror of this repository on Github, mostly used to host the stable release tags, the tutorial and documentation.