Welcome to Impact - A free and simple Explicit Finite element solver.

The documentation for this program is found when starting the GUI

Disclaimer
----------
Remember that you use this software at your own risk. The Impact team cannot be held responsible
for any results of effects of this program. See the GNU license at the end.


Installation
------------
Impact requires Java to be installed on your computer.

All this is explained in the web documentation which is found online at http://impact.sf.net

It is simplest to run Impact from the GUI. To do that, just run the ImpactGUI.bat file in this directory if you are a Windows user
or make the ImpactGUI.sh runnable (chmod 777 ImpactGUI.sh) and run that with ./ImpactGUI if you are a Linux/Unix/Mac user.
Alternatively, just write  bash ImpactGUI.sh  to start.

You can also run the Impact solver alone from the console, stay in this directory. 
Impact is now started by writing   

bash Impact.sh examples/indatafile.in

where indatafile is one of the examples in the examples directory.
The resultfiles will end up there as well.

Impact can also use the GID pre-and postprocessor as environment.
The GID preprocessor can be configured to export Impact indata fies. 

Just copy the entire Impact.gid directory with files and all to the GID subdirectory. Example:
cd Impact/interfaces 
cp -r Impact /homes/myuser/GID7_0/problemtypes/

Instructions how to use this is documented in the manual.

Impact also interfaces with Nastran and Gmsh. More info in the manual.

Contact
-------

Impact and it's authors can be reached from http://impact.sourceforge.net


Licence conditions
------------------

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program;
if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA
02111-1307 USA


Impact version 0.5, Copyright (C) 2005 The Impact Team. Impact comes with
ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are
welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.

Credits
---------------

The Jama library was written by The MathsWorks, Inc and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
The PNG Encoder was written by J. David Eisenberg and licensed under the GPL license.
The Downhill Simplex minimization algorithm was written by Alan Kaminsky and licensed under the GPL license.
Regular Expressions in Java (om.stevesoft.pat) was written by SteveSoft and licenced under LGPL
Galina Golovko has written most of the Russian documentation
Ruediger Heim wrote the first version of the GiD integration interface
Yuriy Mikhaylovskiy has written most of the GUI
Nikolay Skiba helped out with the GUI
Claus Wonnemann wrote the cluster solver prototype
Bernard Haumacher helped Claus & Jonas with JP integration and fresh ideas
Jonas Forssell coordinated and wrote the main part of the solver

Closing
-------

Enjoy!







