Our paper “SOniCS: Interfacing SOFA and FEniCS for advanced constitutive models” received the Best Presentation Award at the FEniCS Conference 2022!
The goal of this work is to incorporate state-of-the-art code generation tools from the FEniCS Project into SOFA in order to significantly increase SOFA’s capabilities in soft tissue mechanics. To this end, we developed a new SOFA plugin named SOniCS.
With SOniCS, adding a new material model is straightforward: the user describes its strain energy density function using UFL (Unified Form Language) syntax. Using FFCx (FEniCSx Form Compiler), the corresponding C code is automatically generated from the differentiated cell-local residual and stiffness forms. These kernels are then assembled in SOFA into global tensors to solve the resulting non-linear system of equations.
This approach makes it possible to implement complex material models — such as the Holzapfel-Ogden anisotropic model — into SOFA in a straightforward manner, and to use them alongside SOFA’s existing strong feature set in medical simulation.
Congratulations to the authors!
