XOA exporter (for Finite Elements Analysis)

[adrianschneider94]

For FEM analysis, meshes of the geometries that are to be analyzed, are needed.
Options to create them, are gmsh and Salome's Smesh. Both support Salome's XAO format (https://gitlab.onelab.info/gmsh/gmsh/-/issues/729) as input - which is just an OpenCascade BREP file, combined with an xml describing faces/volumes and their properties.
Materials and relevant surfaces for boundary conditions etc. could be assigned/tagged on the cadquery side, so on the FEM side, no postprocessing of the geometry is required.
Probably it's not too hard to implement an exporter from a cadquery assembly - it's more or less just the xml file that needs to be written.

Adding an XAO export capability would enable a workflow where one could build the geometry easily with cadquery, pass the result to one of the meshing tools and then run simulations with tools like Salome MECA or fenicsx.

[jmwright]

There is a plugin available to export a tagged CadQuery assembly to Gmsh. It exports to .msh.

https://github.com/CadQuery/assembly-mesh-plugin

[adrianschneider94]

Ahh perfect! Weird, that I haven't stubled on it already. Maybe it should be added to https://github.com/CadQuery/awesome-cadquery or is there another list?

[jmwright]

Good idea, I added it to the plugins list: https://github.com/CadQuery/awesome-cadquery/blob/main/README.md#extensions-and-plugins