femm 3.0 beta version available

[dcm3c@xxxxxxx]

All--

If anyone is interested in helping test out a new version of the program, 
I've put up a new tester/beta version of the program in the files section of 
egroups:

http://www.egroups.com/files/femm/

it's the file ``setup.exe''

If you download it, make sure _not_ to install it over top of your 2.1 
version. Another important note--it reads in files with the 2.1 file format, 
but when it writes back to disk (upon calling the mesher or solver), it 
writes the files back to disk in a new 3.0 format, which the 2.1 version 
doesn't understand. Therefore, if you are looking at the performance of the 
new beta version on some geometry that you have created with the 2.1 version, 
save it to disk with a different filename before you do anything else. The 
reason for the new file format is so that it is more human-readable and more 
easily extensible in terms of adding in new features in the future.

There are a bunch of changes from the 2.1 version. Most of them are 
relatively small--to fix things that annoy me with the 2.1 version. The 
biggest change is to harmonic problems--you can now specify connectivities 
between different parts of the solution domain and fix net currents in parts 
via the new "Circuit" property. To me, this was a real shortcoming in the 
2.1 version. There's also a new notion of lumping together groups of 
entities into a parts, so that it is easier to look at the effects of changes 
in geometry and orientation (like looking at the fields of a rotating machine 
at different rotor orientations).

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to updating the manual to reflect all 
of the changes yet....

Anyhow, I'd be very interested in any comments about this new version.

Dave.
--
http://members.aol.com/dcm3c