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AgentFEM 0.4.1

This small release makes bounded two-way thermoelasticity available through the ordinary model.step() workflow and strengthens sequential thermal-field handoff. It does not rebuild complete offline installers or promote unrelated experimental physics.

Usable, explicit coupling

studies.coupled_thermoelastic() selects shared-mesh, three-dimensional, small-strain thermoelasticity with constant isotropic material in SI units. Displacement, temperature departure, participant loads and strong boundaries are explicit. Procedure owns staggered implicit Euler; Model remains the engineering definition. See the complete design and example.

Both fields advance or roll back together. Progress uses the existing reporter; checkpoint retention is configurable. Joint portable restart retains accepted fields, force history, time and input identity. Final-state XDMF and a standard SimulationResult carry physical time, diagnostics and performance evidence. Manual advance() and automatic run() share configured iteration controls.

Boundary heat, prescribed-motion path work and the backward-Euler quadratic identity are distinct records. The quadratic identity is not a certificate of general thermodynamic energy conservation. Regional materials, nonlinear coupling, nonmatching meshes and transient field-series output are not added.

Verification and reliability

  • Analytical heating and an independently assembled block reference.
  • Independent Fourier-mode refinement: spatial order approximately two and temporal order approximately one for both fields, within its smooth-mode scope.
  • Failed-window rollback and input-bound restart rejection.
  • Public single-to-two-to-single-process continuation, including moving prescribed boundaries and force/work histories.
  • Installed-wheel serial and MPI examples; publication remains gated by the immutable release wheel's Linux/macOS checks.

Sequential multi-material thermal-mechanical workflows also retain field transfer evidence across rejection. Zero eigenstrain/projection and prepared PETSc solution-state handling are corrected without giving up matrix reuse.

Contact and next steps

The current source already contains moving rigid tools, generalized work, multiple bounded pairs, triangle search and MPI routing in the explicit path. Do not mistake the older fixed-plane implicit provider for the whole contact capability. A targeted two-rank audit passed 34 tests per rank across the ordinary explicit provider, distributed search and accepted work state. This does not establish arbitrary industrial contact or forming.

Next work is selected from measured search/assembly/output bottlenecks and unsupported mesh/formulation combinations. Shell forming, self-contact and implicit friction remain separate scientific developments, not prerequisites for using this bounded coupling release.