What is LifeV?

LifeV is a finite element(FE) library providing implementations of state of the art mathematical and numerical methods. It serves both as a research and production library. It has been used already in medical and industrial context to simulate fluid structure interaction and mass transport. LifeV is the joint collaboration between three institutions: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CMCS) in Switzerland, Politecnico di Milano (MOX) in Italy and INRIA (REO) in France.

Application Domains

LifeV has applications in many domains like fluid dynamics, structure dynamics, heat transfer, fluid structure interaction or transport in porous media.

Library

LifeV started two years ago. It is Free Software; the license is LGPL, see http://www.gnu.org. It contains around 50000 lines of C++ code and is growing.

Environment

LifeV uses a modern development environment and proven effective tools. It is a project within the SourceForge™ like environment GForge hosted on http://cmcsforge.epfl.ch providing bug tracking, task management, account management, secure connection and CVS repository.

Portability

LifeV is written in C++ using modern programming techniques, it has been ported to GNU/Linux systems, standard UNIX™ systems and Cygwin systems.

Features

LifeV provides many features and tools. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• flexible and powerful numerical mesh manipulation and, in particular, the handling of moving meshes.
• abstract 2D and 3D FE framework for easy manipulation and implementation of FE. As of now the elements available are: Q0, Q1, P1, P2, {~P}2, P1-Bubble, RT.
• stabilized numerical methods for handling convective dominated transport processes.
• Navier-Stokes solvers based on pressure-correction algebraic splitting methods.
• state of the art numerical methods for fluid structure interaction.