About

Developer(s)

Main Developer: Roozbeh Geraili Mikola, PhD, P.E.

Website: www.roozbehgm.com

Contacts:

Follow @RoozbehRocks

How it started

As a young student, I was always fascinated by the power of computers and the help that they provide to obtain results that are easy to understand for complex simulations. It was not until 2006 that I was introduced to the world of open source Software and since then I contributed with couple of open source geotechnical programs such as NT-DDA and Opensees both developed at University of California at Berkeley. During this period I realized that although some of the academic geotechnical programs have advanced analysis methods and can be very reliable, the lack of good GUI coupled with a complex modelling procedure may result in the software being ignored by the potential users; its practical capabilities will not be embraced and exploited by the engineering communities.

At the beginning of the year 2013, after graduation from school I decided to start my own research project with objective of creating a unified interactive finite element program for geotechnical applications. After almost three years of part-time programming the first version of ADONIS has been released.

During 2020 pandemic (around July 2020), in order to stay sane in quarantine, I decided to start developing a Slope Stability program based on limit equilibrium method (LEM) for soil and rock. After almost 10 months, the first version of program has been released which is called HYRCAN (/hərˈkeɪn/) (Of or pertaining to Hyrcania , an ancient country or province of Asia, southeast of the Caspian Sea).

The objective of ADONIS and HYRCAN is to eventually offer to engineers and teachers a service similar to that of integrated commercial packages. The development of both programs is ongoing. New element formulations, contact algorithms, and constitutive equations are being implemented and will become available in future versions. Continued emphasis will be placed on support and dissemination of programs in the form of documentation of the software and its example problems, and on online forum. I hope that these free frameworks using modern software design principles will not only provide a new and useful tool for computational geomechanics, but also set a new standard for computational simulation software in this field.

The Licensing

ADONIS and HYRCAN are free software lisenced under LGPLv3. Therefore you may freely use both programs for academic, educational and even commercial purposes. However, the LGPL license includes a viral effect i.e. all derived work, if distributed, must be distributed under the same license. The ADONIS and HYRCAN source code also contains 3rd party libraries and various resources which are distributed under their respective licenses. 3rd party libraries and plug-ins are distributed under their respective licenses:

ADONIS:

triangle: free and open source library, Please note that although triangle is freely available, it is copyrighted by the author and may not be sold or included in commercial products without a license. See https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/triangle.html.

QCustomPlot: GPL version 3.0. See http://www.qcustomplot.com/

HYRCAN:

Clipper: an open source freeware library for clipping and offsetting lines and polygons. The Clipper library performs line & polygon clipping - intersection, union, difference & exclusive-or, and line & polygon offsetting. The library is based on Vatti's clipping algorithm