1. Introduction¶
The purpose of the Amelet HDF Specification is to provide a standard for recording and recovering computer data of electromagnetic simulations.
A few well established data format already exist, we can quote :
- CGNS (CFD General Notation System, http://cgns.sourceforge.net/) is recommended for computational fluid dynamics problems (CFD). That’s why a lot of electromagnetic concepts are missing
- SILO (a mesh and field I/O library and scientific database https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/silo/)
- MED (in french “Modélisation et Échanges de Données” http://www.code-aster.org/outils/med/), it is the SALOME’s data format (http://www.salome-platform.org/home/presentation/overview/). Like CGNS, SALOME provides tools for CFD simulation and aren’t adapted to the electromagnetism domain
- netCDF (http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/)
Besides, Amelet HDF Specification is closely related to the Quercy Platform. Quercy is a software platform aiming at :
- Providing knowledge management capabilities
- Providing pre and post processing tools
- Integrating scientific softwares
- Managing software execution
CGNS, SILO and MED specifications give a standard way of describing physical models, mesh definition and many physical concepts. Softwares that can express their native data in CGNS vocabulary are good “customers” for the specification, for data that can not be correctly expressed CGNS offers a “user variable” notion. But for other softwares handling complex structures stranger to the specification, there is no way to use the existing format, even by part.
Quercy Platform expresses data in the form of objects named “infotype”, it is possible to add new infotype to the platform and this infotype have to be converted into equivalent concepts into Amelet HDF. So, Amelet HDF must be sufficiently flexible to express unknown data coming from the new infotypes. This can not be done with CGNS or MED.
The manner Amelet HDF accomplishes this task is described is the document.
Basically, Amelet HDF specification can express all sort of electromagnetic data, the most important are :
- Mesh (unstructured or structured);
- Numerical array data;
- Material models
- Network and transmission line;
- Electromagnetic sources
This document covers all the aspects of the Amelet HDF specification.
Note
Amelet HDF is largely inspired from the Amelet project (http://www.predit.prd.fr/predit3/syntheseProjet.fo?inCde=22740)
