Fem Preferences
The preferences screen of the FEM Workbench are found in the Preferences Editor, Edit → Preferences → Fem.
There are five tabs, one is for General configuration of the workbench.
The rest control how FEM interacts with the external solvers: CalculiX, Gmsh, Z88, and Elmer.
Contents
General
CalculiX
Gmsh
Z88
Elmer
FEM
- Materials: Solid, Fluid, Nonlinear mechanical; Material editor
- Element geometry: Beam (1D), Beam rotation (1D), Shell (2D), Fluid flow (1D)
Constraints
- Electrostatic: Potential
- Fluid: Initial velocity, Fluid boundary, Flow velocity
- Mechanical: Fixed, Displacement, Plane rotation, Contact, Transform, Force, Pressure, Self weight, Bearing, Gear, Pulley
- Thermal: Initial temperature, Heat flux, Temperature, Heat source
- Solve: Calculix tools, CalculiX, Elmer, Z88; Equations: Heat, Elasticity, Electrostatic, Fluxsolver, Flow; Solver: Solver control, Solver run
- Results: Purge, Show; Postprocessing: Apply changes, Pipeline from result, Create warp vector filter, Create scalar clip filter, Create cut filter, Create clip filter, Create data along line filter, Create linearized stresses,
Create data at point filter, Create functions
- Utilities: Clipping plane, Remove clipping planes; Mesh clear, Mesh print info
- Additional: Preferences; FEM Install, FEM Mesh, FEM Solver, FEM CalculiX, FEM Project, FEM Concrete; FEM Element Types
User documentation

- Installation: Linux/Unix, Windows, Mac; Getting started
- Basics: About FreeCAD, Workbenches, Preferences, Document structure, Interface Customization, Properties, Mouse Model; Tutorials
- Workbenches: Std Base; Arch, Draft, FEM, Image, Inspection, Mesh, OpenSCAD, Part, PartDesign, Path, Plot, Points, Raytracing, Reverse Engineering, Robot, Ship, Sketcher, Spreadsheet, Start, Surface workbench, TechDraw, Test Framework, Web
- Scripting: Introduction to Python, FreeCAD scripting tutorial, FreeCAD Scripting Basics, How to install macros, Gui Command, Units Modules: Builtin modules, Workbench creation, Installing more workbenches Meshes: Mesh Scripting, Mesh Module Parts: The Part Module, Topological data scripting, PythonOCC, Mesh to Part Coin scenegraph: The Coin/Inventor scenegraph, Pivy Qt interface: PySide, Using the FreeCAD GUI, Dialog creation Parametric objects: Scripted objects Other: Code snippets, Line drawing function, Embedding FreeCAD, FreeCAD vector math library, Power users hub, Python, Macros, FreeCAD Scripting Basics, Topological data scripting