OneCAD-Simulation/ROADMAP.md

# Roadmap

FieldCraft's goal is CAE modeling on par with Abaqus/CAE, Nastran pre-processors and LS-PrePost,
with hexahedral meshing as the centre of gravity, plus its own linear solver. Abaqus/CAE is the
reference for scope (its documentation is excellent and its solver strong); its application is
where we aim to be clearly better: parametric geometry from SolidCraft, sets that survive
remeshing, automatic hex partitioning, undo, a text-diffable model and agent control.
The capability checklist is [docs/parity.md](docs/parity.md). Beyond the pre-processor and the
linear solver come our own explicit, CFD (lattice Boltzmann) and fluid–structure solvers (M10–M14;
methods and papers in [docs/solvers/literature.md](docs/solvers/literature.md)).

Order (revised 2026-10-13): one end-to-end slice first — *SolidCraft part → named faces → sets →
mesh → material and section → BCs and loads → static and frequency steps → Abaqus, Nastran and
LS-DYNA decks and our own solve → contour plot* — on tet meshes, so every hex mesher lands in a
pipeline that already produces solvable, verified models. Then hex: structured (sweep and mapped,
with partitions proposed automatically) before octree all-hex, because that is how analysts get
hex meshes today and it gives the best elements where stresses are read.

Revised 2026-10-14 after a gap review (below): the implicit side is linear today, and nearly
everything analysts ask for next — contact and friction, elastomers, viscoelasticity, creep,
adhesion, composite failure, tissues — needs a nonlinear implicit solver first. The nonlinear
core (M15) therefore comes right after automatic hex (M6) and before contact (M7). Every material
model is written once in `fieldcraft-fem` with its consistent tangent and serves the implicit and
explicit solvers alike; every coupled field (temperature, pressure, electric potential, pore
pressure) is a degree of freedom of the existing DOF framework, not a separate solver.

| Milestone | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| M0 Foundation | Workspace, quality gates, FE model, command engine with rollback and panic guard, CLI, geometry boundary on SolidCraft | done |
| M1 Geometry in and surface preparation | Open `.solidcraft` designs with persistent face names, assemblies placed (done); face-tagged 3MF (done); test corpus, `cargo xtask corpus` (done); exact predicates (done); quality metrics and certified validity gate (done); weld, closed/manifold/orientation and self-intersection checks, feature edges (`fieldcraft-mesh::surface`, `mesh.surface.check`, done) | in progress |
| M2 Tet meshing and size field | Size field (global, curvature and proximity; edge seeds done: `mesh.seed.edge` on persistent design edge names (`<face>|<face>`) with a count or size, geometric bias and an exact, min or free constraint, shown as ticks and under Mesh › Seeds, honoured by the hex sweep, extrude, revolve, mapped, blocks and cells meshers through interval assignment (conflicting exact seeds named) and by the tet mesher, which divides the edge at the seed's nodes and grades its size field from them; per-face seeds to do; the `fieldcraft_mesh::size::SizeField` trait and edge-division helpers are in; size controls done (#435): `mesh.size.set` on faces, bodies, a box or a sphere with a growth rate (`mesh.size.growth`), saved with the model, listed by `mesh.size.list`, drawn in the viewport, honoured by the tet mesher's graded field, the structured hex meshers' and the block projection's divisions and the octree's depth); Bowyer–Watson Delaunay (exact, symbolic perturbation, verified; `fieldcraft-mesh::delaunay`, done); robust CDT boundary recovery (Diazzi et al. 2023: implicit LNC Steiner points on segments, gift-wrapping facet recovery, inside/outside labelling, B-rep face tags on boundary tet faces, flip repair of rounding (§5.1) checked by the validity gate; `fieldcraft-mesh::cdt` and `mesh.tet.generate`, done: all 20 valid corpus parts); quality stage (done: `fieldcraft-mesh::tet` — curvature-graded size field, edge-collapse coarsening, constrained Delaunay refinement with boundary points on the B-rep faces and curves, ODT smoothing, Klingner–Shewchuk improvement, tet4 and tet10 with mid-side nodes on the B-rep, quality report; one validity criterion shared by the gate and both solvers; the filleted-bracket fillet stress converges, tests/oracle); mesh verify per set | in progress |
| M3 First deck | Sets and surfaces bound to SolidCraft face, edge, vertex and body names, resolved after meshing; materials (isotropic and orthotropic elastic, density) with a unit-system label and consistency check; sections (solid, shell, beam profiles) assigned by set; element formulation per region mapped to each solver; BCs (fixed, displacement, symmetry); loads (force and moment on reference points, pressure, gravity); reference points with kinematic and distributing coupling; steps (linear static, frequency) with explicit per-step load and BC tables and output presets; `model.check` naming every missing or bad item; `model.*` and `mesh.tag` commands (model definition: done); writers for Abaqus input (done: `deck.write`), Nastran SOL 101/103 (done: `deck.write`) and LS-DYNA implicit (done); the `.fieldcraft` file (text definition, binary mesh, geometry references reopened on load, journal; atomic saves, autosave and recovery; undo/redo on the journal: done) | in progress |
| M4 Own solver and first results | Element library per docs/elements.md (1D and 2D first); Linear static and modal solver (tet4/10, wedge6, hex8, hex20; sparse direct, Lanczos), verified against analytic solutions (solver: done — `fieldcraft-fem` kernels, `fieldcraft-solver` with nested dissection, sparse Cholesky and block Lanczos, `solve.static`/`solve.frequency`/`solve.probe`, patch, cantilever, Lamé, Kirsch and beam-frequency tests; reference points with kinematic and distributing couplings and moments by master–slave constraint elimination, verified by rigid motion, clamping, Saint-Venant tension, bending and tube torsion; 1D elements I: rod2/rod3 trusses, point masses, rotary inertia, springs and dashpots in both solvers and all three decks, verified by the method of joints, the three-bar truss, spring–mass, two-mass chain and torsional pendulum frequencies, and damped decay; 2D elements: plane stress, plane strain and axisymmetric tri3, tri6, quad4 (incompatible modes QM6), quad8 with two degrees of freedom per node, centrifugal loads, `mesh.planar` 2D meshes of polygons and planar faces, verified by patch tests, Kirsch, Lamé (plane strain and axisymmetric), rotating discs and cylinders, and a plane stress cantilever; deck mapping to Abaqus CPS/CPE/CAX, Nastran membranes, LS-DYNA ELFORM 12/13); shells and beams (done: quad4 MITC4 and tri3 MITC3 flat shells with a Hughes–Brezzi drilling rotation, two-node Timoshenko beams with profile properties and orientations, six degrees of freedom at shell and beam nodes shared with solids and trusses, section forces and surface stresses, verified by shell patch tests, Navier's plate, cantilever and portal-frame beams, and the Scordelis–Lo and pinched-cylinder benchmarks); results display (done: `results.*` commands, deformed shape to scale, banded contours of displacement, von Mises, principal and component stresses with a legend, mode shapes with their frequencies and animation, probing a node by clicking it, reaction force and moment sums per set, stale results marked after an edit; explicit steps: field frames by slider or animation with contours per frame, energy histories plotted) | started |
| M5 Structured hex | 2D quad meshing of faces (`fieldcraft-mesh::quad`: transfinite mapped meshes, free all-quad meshes of polygons with holes on prescribed boundary nodes, exact planar quad validity, shared `SizeField` and even edge divisions; done for planar faces); mapped hex of six-sided regions (trivariate TFI, curved faces) and sweep meshing (multi-level extrusions with imprinted cross-sections, revolutions, one-to-one sweeps through linking faces; interval assignment, hex8/hex20 on the geometry, B-rep face tags, `mesh.hex.generate`/`sweep`/`mapped`: done, 16 of 21 corpus parts all-hex); conforming interfaces between cells (done: `mesh.hex.blocks` meshes a part split with SolidCraft's Split Body into mapped blocks as one conforming mesh — composite faces for seams and tangent faces, interval assignment over all cells, shared faces meshed once, grading off holes and fillets, free-internal-face check; the filleted bracket in 30 cells, hex20 within 0.1 % of a fine tet10 tip deflection); partitions inside FieldCraft (done: datum planes and axes, `geometry.partition` cuts the open design by a datum plane, kept in the model and replayed when the design opens, the two faces of each cut paired by name); cells meshed each with its own method into one mesh (done: `mesh.cells` — hex where a method fits, else tet; matching interfaces merged node for node, others, such as hex next to tet, tied by dual mortar, verified by a tied hex–tet bar in tension to 1e-6); meshing half a symmetric part and mirroring it (done: `mesh.mirror` reflects hex8/hex20/tet4/tet10/wedge6 across a datum plane, right-handed, nodes on the plane merged, tags carried to the image half; a mirrored half bar equals the whole bar's mesh and bending deflection to 1e-12; samples `crank-arm` and `crank-mirror`: one datum, the half extruded in automatic blocks and mirrored, scaled Jacobian ≥ 0.37; or solving the half: `model.boundary_condition.symmetry` on a datum plane, a half bar with half the load bends as the whole to 1e-11); three-sided sweep regions mapped as triangle primitives (done: midpoint subdivision, dominance constraints in interval assignment); automatic blocks of extruded cross-sections (done: `hex::decompose` — holes separated, O-grids, cuts from concave corners and fillets chosen by block quality, kept only when no worse than the free mesh; nothing added to the model); pyramid transitions; automatic decomposition of 3D parts into sweepable and mappable regions | started |
| M6 Automatic hex | Octree/grid all-hex for any part (first version: done — `fieldcraft-mesh::octree`, `mesh.hex.octree`: 3-refinement grid with conforming templates refined by curvature, thickness and narrow faces, a core cleared to a manifold boundary, feature map onto it, padding and a pillow per patch capturing every sharp curve, foldover-free fitting, certified validity, B-rep face tags; the corpus hex column and the filleted-bracket oracle case; next: transitions for concave refined regions so thin and curved parts stop over-refining); hex-dominant by tet recombination; polycube for blocky parts; layers through thin walls; mesh editing (node tools done: `mesh.node.merge` equivalences coincident nodes with sets and tags following the survivors and element collapses left out, previewed in its form; `mesh.check.duplicates` lists unmerged nodes, repeated elements, cracks and free edges and selects them; `mesh.renumber` compact, by body or in reverse Cuthill–McKee order, every reference following) and orphan-mesh import | started |
| M7 Assemblies, contact and friction | Needs M15. Part instances from SolidCraft occurrences; tie between non-matching meshes (mortar: done — `interaction.tie`, dual mortar constraints in the implicit analyses, Abaqus `*TIE` and LS-DYNA tied contact, the tie patch test); implicit contact: surface-to-surface mortar and node-to-surface, penalty and augmented Lagrange, self-contact, automatic pair detection (mortar contact pairs with Coulomb friction in nonlinear static steps: done — segment-to-segment mortar with the consistent tangent by automatic differentiation of the segmentation, augmented Lagrangian with Uzawa updates to a gap tolerance, semismooth active set with a chattering cutback, small sliding without nonlinear geometry and finite sliding with it, overclosure adjusted or refused, Coulomb friction (stick/slip return map, static and kinetic coefficients, symmetrised tangent), pressure, gap, status, shear and slip output; verified by the contact patch test, Hertz cylinder and sphere, Newton's quadratic rate and sliding blocks; the linear analyses refuse contact by name); friction: Coulomb with stick–slip, static/kinetic, anisotropic, pressure-, rate- and temperature-dependent coefficients; contact output (pressure, slip, status); thermal contact conductance and frictional heating; wear (Archard); bolt pretension, connectors with behaviour (elastic, damped, stops, locks); amplitudes, multiple steps, restart; nonlinear steps in all three decks. Verified by Hertz (sphere and cylinder), the Cattaneo–Mindlin partial-slip problem, the sliding block, NAFEMS contact benchmarks | started |
| M8 Materials, explicit, shells, composites | Plasticity, hyperelasticity, damage data per solver; explicit dynamics decks (Abaqus/Explicit, LS-DYNA); midsurface shells; composite layups and material orientations, continuum shells on swept hex; hybrid (mixed u–p) hex8/hex20/tet10 for nearly incompressible materials (done); heat transfer (solids done: steady and θ-method transient conduction with flux, convection and sources, thermal strain in static steps (solids and 2D) and explicit dynamics (with plasticity), coupled temperature–displacement, `solve.heat`; deck output, 2D/shell/beam conduction planned) | started |
| M9 Post-processing and deck readers | Results readers for public formats (Nastran OP2, LS-DYNA d3plot, Abaqus `.fil`); XY and path plots, cuts, display groups, free-body forces; deck readers that keep unknown keywords; mesh convergence studies | planned |
| M10 Explicit dynamics | Shared element and material kernels with the implicit solver (`fem`); central-difference solver with lumped mass, stable time step, one-point hex8 with hourglass control and nodal-pressure tet4, bulk viscosity, energy accounting (X1 core: done — `fieldcraft-explicit`, `explicit_dynamic` steps with initial velocities, prescribed motion and planar rigid walls, `solve.explicit`/`solve.history`, small-strain linear elastic; bar wave, rigid-wall impact, energy balance and cantilever-period tests); large-deformation materials (X2: done — updated Lagrangian elements, Jaumann/Hughes–Winget and Green–Naghdi/Flanagan–Taylor rates, J2 bilinear/table plasticity, Johnson–Cook strength with heating and damage, erosion; materials gain `plastic`, `damage`, `erosion` with `model.material.plasticity`/`damage`; Dienes shear, rigid rotation, J2 uniaxial and Taylor-bar tests); contact (X3: done — `interaction.contact.pair`/`general`/`find`, segment-to-segment penalty contact both ways with polygon clipping (passes the contact patch test on non-matching meshes), pairs, general (all exterior faces) and self contact, bucket-grid search, deterministic on any thread count, a penalty from the masses and the stable increment that never shortens it, Coulomb friction with exponential decay by a return map, friction on rigid walls, contact energy and friction dissipation in the balance, initial penetrations adjusted or refused; Abaqus `*CONTACT PAIR`/`*CONTACT`/`*FRICTION` and LS-DYNA automatic contacts in the decks; verified by colliding bars, sliding blocks, the patch test and Hertz's sphere impact); hyperelastic materials (neo-Hookean, Mooney–Rivlin, Yeoh) on the shared material point with average nodal pressure tets, and opt-in mass scaling with the added mass reported: done; runs on hex and tet meshes | started |
| M11 Equations of state and shells | Polynomial, ideal-gas, Mie–Grüneisen, JWL with programmed burn, tabulated; energy coupling; shock verification (Rankine–Hugoniot, Sod, Noh, Sedov); Belytschko–Lin–Tsay shells with self-contact on quad meshes | planned |
| M12 CFD: lattice Boltzmann | D3Q19/D3Q27 on grids voxelised from the face-tagged surface; TRT, regularised and cumulant collision; interpolated walls, inlets and outlets; LES (Smagorinsky, WALE) with wall models; thermal LBM and conjugate heat transfer with the structure's thermal solver; non-Newtonian viscosity (power-law, Carreau–Yasuda, Cross, Herschel–Bulkley, Bingham) and temperature-dependent viscosity; porous media (Brinkman, Darcy–Forchheimer); multiphase and free surface (M13); validation by the lid-driven cavity, backward-facing step, cylinder wake (Strouhal) and turbulent channel; octree refinement shared with the hex mesher; wgpu backend (deterministic per device, checked against the CPU) (CPU core: done — `fieldcraft-lbm` with D3Q19 TRT and Guo forcing, halfway bounce-back and moving walls, slip and periodic faces, Zou–He velocity and pressure faces, exact voxelisation of obstacle bodies, momentum-exchange forces per face; fluid materials, fluid domains and fluid steps in the model; `model.fluid_domain.*`, `solve.fluid`; verified by Poiseuille channel and pipe, Couette, Taylor–Green decay, sphere-array Stokes drag and mass conservation; Schäfer–Turek 2D-1 as a benchmark; results in the viewport and headless pictures: velocity or pressure on a slice, the obstacles coloured by the flow beside them and streamlines seeded upstream, `results.slice`, `results.surface`, `results.streamlines`: done) | started |
| M13 Fluid–structure interaction | Immersed-boundary coupling of the lattice Boltzmann fluid with the explicit or implicit structure; interface force transfer; sub-cycling; Aitken then interface quasi-Newton coupling; free-surface flow | planned |
| M14 Blast and impact fluids | EOS-driven fluids in the explicit solver: ALE multi-material or SPH, with fluid–structure contact | planned |
| M15 Nonlinear implicit core | Newton–Raphson with line search, automatic increments and cutbacks, convergence on force, displacement and energy; geometric nonlinearity (total and updated Lagrangian, large rotations for shells and beams, follower pressure); every `fem` material behind one interface with its consistent tangent (plasticity, damage and thermal strain from the explicit solver reused implicitly); arc-length (Riks) for snap-through; linear buckling (eigen) with preload stress stiffening, and imperfections from buckling modes; nonlinear stabilisation; restart. Verified by the elastica, Lee's frame, the snap-through arch, the hinged cylindrical shell and plastic collapse loads (solids core: done — `nonlinear_static` steps with automatic increments and cutbacks, Newton–Raphson with the consistent tangent, force, displacement and energy convergence and an optional line search; a material point interface (Kirchhoff stress and spatial tangent from F, with history) with St Venant–Kirchhoff and compressible neo-Hookean; total Lagrangian tet4, tet10, wedge6, hex8, hex20 (full and reduced), hybrid hex8/hex20/tet10 by the three-field mixed form, plane strain and axisymmetric elements; follower pressure with its symmetrised load stiffness; Cauchy stress and logarithmic strain, increment history and frames, `solve.nonlinear`; Abaqus and LS-DYNA decks; verified by the patch and objectivity tests, uniaxial stretch, the elastica and tube inflation by a follower pressure (finite-strain Cook's membrane pending its transcribed reference; J2 plasticity on the interface: Simo's exponential return map at finite strain and the radial return at small strain, both with consistent tangents and the return shared with explicit dynamics, bilinear isotropic and kinematic (small strain), tabulated and Johnson–Cook (rate-independent) hardening, hybrid elements included, load paths for cyclic loading, a tangent predictor for path-dependent materials, verified by uniaxial tension to large strain, Hill's thick cylinder (plastic zone and collapse pressure), a cantilever's collapse and the Bauschinger effect, with quadratic Newton convergence; Mooney–Rivlin and Yeoh options (decoupled, hybrid elements), verified in Treloar's three modes and by a stretched tube's inflation; thermal strain by the multiplicative split at finite strain and the additive one at small strain, with temperatures from temperature loads or the step's own conduction, verified by free and constrained expansion and a heated bar held past yield. a supernodal symmetric indefinite LDLᵀ factorization (bounded Bunch–Kaufman within supernodes, inertia) on which Newton continues through indefinite tangents, so nearly incompressible hybrid elements (ν = 0.4999) converge under prescribed displacement; linear buckling steps (linear preload, initial-stress stiffness of solids and 2D elements, block Lanczos in the K inner product, the shifted buckling transformation on LDLᵀ with an inertia count, `solve.buckle`, Abaqus `*BUCKLE`), verified by Euler columns and Bryan's plate; imperfections from buckling modes; arc-length (Riks–Crisfield, cylindrical or spherical) with limit and bifurcation points from the tangent's inertia, verified by the snap-through of a shallow arch. Next: Lee's frame and the hinged cylindrical shell (with shells), the follower pressure's full tangent (LU), incompatible modes (EAS), kinematic hardening at finite strain, shells and beams) | started |
| M16 Structural dynamics | Implicit transient (Newmark, HHT-α, generalised-α); modal superposition transient; steady-state harmonic (direct and modal), with Rayleigh, modal, structural and material damping; random vibration from PSDs and response spectrum (SRSS, CQC); complex eigenvalues with damping; rotating machinery (Campbell diagrams, gyroscopic terms); substructures (Craig–Bampton) | planned |
| M17 Constitutive library and material library | Elastic: transversely isotropic, fully anisotropic (21 constants), temperature-dependent. Elastomers: hyperelastic neo-Hookean, Mooney–Rivlin, Yeoh (these three done, in nonlinear steps), Ogden, Arruda–Boyce, Gent, Marlow, with Mullins softening and finite-strain viscoelasticity (Prony series; parallel networks after Bergström–Boyce), foams. Viscoelasticity: small- and finite-strain Prony series, time–temperature superposition (WLF, Arrhenius), storage and loss moduli for harmonic steps. Viscoplasticity and creep: Norton power law, time and strain hardening, Perzyna, Anand, Chaboche combined hardening. Plasticity: Hill anisotropic, Drucker–Prager, Mohr–Coulomb, Cam-clay, crushable foam, concrete damaged plasticity, Gurson. Fluids: Newtonian and non-Newtonian viscosity shared with M12. Material library: curated, cited data sets (steels, aluminium and titanium alloys, polymers, elastomers, composites, tissues) with units and temperature dependence; calibration from test data (uniaxial, biaxial, shear, relaxation, DMA) by least squares with Drucker stability checks; user materials as a safe Rust trait | planned |
| M18 Composites and anisotropy | Material orientations (rectangular, cylindrical, spherical, from geometry edges and faces, per-element fields, draping of fibres over curved parts); layups on shells and continuum shells, ply stacks on swept hex; classical lamination theory checks; ply stresses and strains through the thickness; failure indices (Tsai–Wu, Tsai–Hill, Hashin, Puck, LaRC) and progressive damage; homogenisation (rule of mixtures, Mori–Tanaka, RVEs with periodic boundary conditions); delamination through M20's cohesive zones. Verified by laminate closed forms and the NAFEMS composite benchmarks | planned |
| M19 Coupled fields | On the DOF framework, each a degree of freedom beside the displacements: piezoelectricity (electric potential, d/e coupling and permittivity matrices, voltage and charge conditions, resonance and impedance through M16 harmonic steps); poroelasticity (Biot, u–p, Darcy flow, consolidation; Terzaghi and Mandel verification; soils and biphasic tissue); electro-thermal (Joule heating) and thermo-electro-mechanical coupling; acoustics (Helmholtz elements, structure–acoustic coupling, absorbing boundaries); low-frequency electromagnetics later | planned |
| M20 Damage, fracture, fatigue and adhesion | Continuum damage beyond Johnson–Cook (Lemaitre, ductile and shear criteria) for implicit and explicit; fracture mechanics (J-integral and stress intensity factors, crack-front meshes from the hex mesher; XFEM later); fatigue (S–N and ε–N with mean-stress corrections, rainflow counting, Paris crack growth); adhesion and debonding by cohesive zones (bilinear and exponential traction–separation, mixed mode with Benzeggagh–Kenane) as cohesive elements and cohesive contact; adhesive joints. Verified by DCB, ENF and MMB delamination tests and published fatigue data | planned |
| M21 Biomechanics and biomaterials | Soft tissue: Holzapfel–Gasser–Ogden fibre-reinforced hyperelasticity with dispersion, Fung, transversely isotropic models; biphasic and poro-hyperelastic cartilage (M19); active muscle (Hill-type); hydrogel swelling. Bone: density-dependent moduli from CT data, strain-energy-density remodelling (Huiskes, Beaupré). Growth and remodelling by kinematic growth (F = Fe·Fg). Implants and biomaterials (titanium, PEEK, UHMWPE) from the M17 library. Verified against published experiments with their tolerances | planned |
| M22 Design studies | Parameters of the SolidCraft design driven from FieldCraft: parametric sweeps, design of experiments, response surfaces and sensitivities; topology optimisation (SIMP with filters, manufacturing constraints); size and shape optimisation; submodelling (driven boundaries from a global model); uncertainty quantification | planned |
| M23 Wave propagation and ultrasound | Elastic, acoustic and coupled waves from the explicit solver's 1D bar today to guided and ultrasonic waves, by two methods. Finite differences first, for fast 2D (then 3D) ultrasound on regular grids: staggered-grid velocity–stress FDTD (Virieux) and the elastodynamic finite integration technique for solids, the rotated staggered grid for anisotropic media, a k-space pseudospectral scheme for weakly heterogeneous tissue and water, all on grids voxelised from the face-tagged geometry by the LBM's exact voxeliser, with heterogeneous, layered and fluid–solid media, CPML boundaries, threads and the GPU backend; staircased curved boundaries scatter spuriously, so the FD grid is checked against the finite elements on curved parts. Finite elements for curved geometry and coupling with structures: spectral elements (high-order Gauss–Lobatto–Legendre hexes with diagonal mass) on the hex meshes, and a mesh check in elements per wavelength with the dispersion error it implies; absorbing boundaries (convolutional PML, absorbing layers with increasing damping) and infinite media; tone-burst sources (Hann-windowed cycles), point, line and surface excitation, and piezoelectric transducers (M19); anisotropic media (composites, crystals) and viscoelastic, power-law-in-frequency attenuation; fluid–solid interfaces and fluid-loaded plates; ultrasound in water and tissue, nonlinear acoustics (Westervelt, KZK) for focused ultrasound. Guided waves: dispersion curves by semi-analytical finite elements (SAFE) for plates, pipes, rails and layered and anisotropic laminates — Lamb, Rayleigh, Love and SH modes — with phase and group velocities and mode shapes; mode-selective excitation. Output: A-scans and B-scans at sensors, wavefield snapshots, 2D FFT (frequency–wavenumber) for mode identification, and time–frequency diagrams of any signal — short-time Fourier spectrograms, continuous wavelet transforms (Morlet), reassigned spectrograms and smoothed pseudo Wigner–Ville — with the SAFE or Rayleigh–Lamb group-velocity curves overlaid as arrival times, and group velocities extracted from the ridges. GPU paths (M12's backend) for long runs. Verified by Lamb's problem (point load on a half-space), Rayleigh-wave speed, Rayleigh–Lamb dispersion, Love waves in a layer over a half-space, reflection and transmission at interfaces, and published guided-wave measurements | planned |
| Continuous: verification and validation | Every capability checked against theory (closed forms), experiments (published measurements) and published benchmarks (NAFEMS, vendor benchmark and verification manuals such as Abaqus's), each case our own model in `tests/oracle/` with its cited reference and tolerance; `cargo xtask oracle` runs them and writes docs/oracle.md; once a case matches, our result is frozen as a fixture so fidelity cannot regress (docs/verification.md). Runner, fixtures and CI job: done; 62 theory cases (patch tests of every solid element, cantilevers, Lamé in 3D, plane strain and axisymmetric, Kirsch in 3D and plane stress, rotating disc and cylinder, beam frequencies, couplings, explicit waves, impact and J2 plasticity, CDT invariants), 15 published benchmarks (the MacNeal–Harder solid tests, the Scordelis–Lo roof with solids and with shells, the pinched cylinder, NAFEMS LE1 in 3D and 2D, LE2, LE3, LE5, LE7, LE10, FV32) and 8 pending cases with citations (the pinched hemisphere and twisted beam shell meshes, thermal, Cook's membrane, Taylor bar, CFD, explicit Hertz contact); `mesh.block` mapped blocks and 2D patches build their meshes, curved shell patches are written node by node | started |
| Continuous: performance | CPU first, deterministic: results never depend on the thread count (fixed partitions, sums in a fixed order; checked by hashing results on 1, 2 and 7 threads). Supernodal left-looking Cholesky (11–15× faster than the column solver on one thread), parallel element matrices, stresses and Lanczos products, explicit element updates and LBM cell blocks on rayon threads (done — `fieldcraft-parallel`, `threads` on the solve commands, `FIELDCRAFT_THREADS`); parallel forward/back substitution and explicit tet4 assembly; GPU paths later, within a stated tolerance of the CPU | started |
| Continuous: desktop and agents | Desktop app (viewport, model tree, commands, control channel, the open design drawn, `ui.capture` of the whole window offscreen: done; toolbar of every capability from the catalogue, ready or coming soon with its milestone, icons drawn with VectorCraft, docs/features.md: done; the Craft-family shell — title bar, workspaces and ribbon drop-downs, browser, context panel, command search, journal timeline, light and dark themes — native file pickers with background opening, drag and drop and recent files, samples and one-click Solve, and an examples gallery of ready-to-solve samples, each checked by a test (docs/examples.md): done; MCP server over stdio, headless or bridged to the app, with read and write roots, docs/mcp.md: done; caps labels in Inter SemiBold; the README's analysis video recorded through MCP by `tools/demo-video`: done; support, load, reference-point and coupling symbols in the viewport and headless renders, with their browser toggles: done; symbols as wireframes, one mark per constrained degree of freedom, a constant size on screen with a size setting, highlighted with their selected definition, concentrated loads drawn over the part: done; selection by picking in the viewport — geometry faces, edges, vertices and bodies, mesh nodes, element faces and elements, box selection, hover, a Target row in command forms, `ui.select`/`ui.selection` and MCP `select`: done; a camera parameter for screenshots, a ribbon that follows the command being run: in progress; the browser build — the same app in a web page with browser file pickers, downloads, drops and autosave to browser storage, deployed to GitHub Pages from each release, docs/web.md: done; in-app updates — a daily check of GitHub Releases, Help › Check for Updates and Reinstall, downloads verified against the release key's signature of SHA256SUMS.txt and swapped in after closing, `app.update.check`, `fieldcraft-cli update`, Reload to update in the browser, docs/updates.md: done), command schema as the public API | started |

## 0.6.0: the UI/UX release

What landed for 0.6.0 (milestone 0.6.0 on GitHub):

- **Browser:** status checks in one aligned column, Interactions counting ties, a selected set
  highlighted in the viewport, seeds selectable, editable and deletable, definitions shown with
  units instead of raw JSON, one highlighted item per context menu, given names shown as typed,
  and a setup checklist that does not ask for a load on a displacement-driven model or for a
  support or load on a free body in explicit dynamics (#315, #335, #336, #352, #356, #361, #366).
- **Results:** units on every legend, summary, probe and reaction sum; legend ranges that can be
  clamped; max and min markers in the viewport; an energies plot with axes and the current frame;
  the deformed shape kept when the field changes; a sensible auto scale for large strains; setup
  symbols off over contours; heat flow through each convection and flux load; probe and reaction
  results exported to CSV (#92, #191, #319, #321, #325–#332, #362).
- **Forms, progress and jobs:** solves and meshers run as jobs with their step, stage, count and
  elapsed time and a Cancel that interrupts every solver and mesher; the control channel and MCP
  wait for a long solve; mesher forms report what they made; typed fields for label lists, point
  lists, multi-choices and number-or-auto, JSON fields with hints, defaults shown as set; forms
  without orphan sets on Cancel; unknown parameters refused (#169, #316, #322–#324, #337, #339,
  #340, #353, #357, #367, #371).
- **Picking and preparation:** vertices pickable, selected edges visible over the mesh, a
  reference point placed by a pick or a hole's centre, Seed Edges switching the filter to edges,
  live previews and default names for datums and partitions, readable partition cell names, the
  Partitioned Mesh form with picks and per-cell methods, a mesh marked out of date when its seeds
  or partitions change, remeshing from the current mesh's settings (#338, #341–#349, #351).
- **UI conveniences:** File › New (`file.new`), Help › Crash Reports, the I-beam sample, every
  sample with a Start-card thumbnail and a gallery capture, node tools (merge, duplicates, free
  edges, renumber), the mesh quality panel's histograms and worst elements, Mirror Mesh and Mesh
  Block on the ribbon, Rigid Wall in Interactions, readable journal entries and status messages,
  a sample's name on its document tab, the web build naming an unknown sample (#113, #143, #144,
  #200, #234, #300, #333, #334, #348, #350, #354, #355, #359, #360, #365).
- **Mesh soundness:** tet improvement that no longer crowds one vertex, hex20 extrudes that pass
  the validity gate where hex8 does, biased seeds carried to the opposite edge of a mapped face,
  designs with a closed internal void and face names over 256 characters meshed (#197, #257,
  #311, #364, #374).
- **Heat:** heat transfer across ties for bonded multi-body thermal models (#358).

## Next

In progress, in this order of landing:

1. Tet quality: sliver repair and Delaunay refinement to a size field, so curved and filleted parts
   (the filleted bracket) solve on tets (M2).
2. Octree all-hex (M6): concave transitions (Schneiders' modified templates or Livesu's dual schemes) so curved and thin-walled parts mesh without filling their hull with fine cells.
3. The analysis video regenerated with the setup's symbols (done: support, load, reference-point
   and coupling symbols in the viewport and headless renders), captions and an orbit (screenshot
   camera and the ribbon following the command: done).
4. A Scordelis–Lo refinement study (32×32×2, 64×64×4, hex20 full and reduced) separating
   discretisation error from the solid-versus-shell model difference (−0.33 % today).
5. The nonlinear implicit core (M15), the gate for contact (M7), elastomers and viscoelasticity
   (M17), composite failure (M18), adhesion (M20) and tissues (M21): solids, hyperelasticity and
   follower pressure done; J2 plasticity and Mooney–Rivlin on the material point interface next.

## Gap review (2026-10-14)

What exists and what is missing, by area; each gap is in a milestone above.

| Area | Today | Missing |
|---|---|---|
| Solution procedures | Linear static, nonlinear static (solids with geometric and material nonlinearity: hyperelasticity, J2 plasticity), frequency (Lanczos), steady and transient heat, coupled temperature–displacement, explicit dynamics, LBM flow | Nonlinear shells and beams, arc-length, buckling (M15); implicit, harmonic, random and spectrum dynamics (M16) |
| Contact, friction, adhesion | Explicit deformable contact (pairs, general, self; segment to segment, penalty) with Coulomb friction and exponential decay; rigid walls with friction; implicit mortar contact pairs (augmented Lagrangian, Coulomb friction) in nonlinear static steps; ties between non-matching meshes (dual mortar); couplings, springs, dashpots | Implicit self contact, anisotropic and pressure- or temperature-dependent friction, thermal contact, wear, eroding contact (M7, M10); cohesive adhesion and debonding (M20) |
| Materials | Isotropic and orthotropic elasticity, density, thermal, J2 plasticity (bilinear, table, Johnson–Cook), Johnson–Cook damage and erosion, compressible neo-Hookean, Mooney–Rivlin and Yeoh hyperelasticity, Newtonian fluids | Elastomers beyond Yeoh (Ogden, Arruda–Boyce and the rest), viscoelasticity, viscoplasticity and creep, anisotropic and pressure-dependent plasticity, non-Newtonian viscosity, a cited material library and calibration (M17) |
| Composites and anisotropy | Orthotropic constants | Orientations, layups, ply results, failure criteria, homogenisation (M18) |
| Coupled fields | Thermal–structural (one way and coupled) | Piezoelectric, poroelastic, electro-thermal, acoustics (M19) |
| Failure | Johnson–Cook damage and element erosion (explicit) | Fracture mechanics, fatigue, cohesive zones, composite progressive damage (M18, M20) |
| Biomechanics | — | Tissue models, cartilage, muscle, bone remodelling, growth (M21) |
| Fluid dynamics | LBM D3Q19 TRT, walls, inlets/outlets, obstacle forces | Turbulence with wall models, thermal and conjugate heat transfer, non-Newtonian, porous media, multiphase, GPU (M12, M13) |
| Wave propagation | One-dimensional elastic waves and impact in the explicit solver (bar cases in the oracle) | A 2D/3D finite-difference ultrasound solver (velocity–stress FDTD, EFIT, k-space pseudospectral) on voxelised geometry, time–frequency diagrams (spectrogram, wavelet, Wigner–Ville) with dispersion overlays, spectral elements, absorbing boundaries, tone-burst and transducer sources, attenuation, Lamb/Rayleigh/Love guided waves and SAFE dispersion curves, ultrasound in fluids and tissue, nonlinear acoustics, A/B-scans and frequency–wavenumber analysis (M23) |
| Design | — | Parametric studies on SolidCraft parameters, optimisation, submodelling (M22) |

### Heated flow results (#157)

Temperature is available on fluid slices, obstacle surfaces and streamline colours when the
saved frames carry it. Signed face-average wall heat follows recorded histories and the
model's power/area units. Commands, the Results panel and headless pictures share the view;
initial frames without recorded wall heat remain uncoloured.

### Flow start-up transient and gallery clip (#164)

`results.animate` now plays a fluid step's frames in order, the start-up transient from the
uniform initial field to the settled flow, the way an explicit step plays its frames; the fluid Results
panel gains an Animate control. The `flow-past` gallery sample gains a clip and a solved still of
the air flowing past the L-bracket, regenerated by `tools/flow-clip/make.py` (the app rendered
frame by frame over the control channel, encoded with ffmpeg). The wake forms and the drag
settles; it does not shed (that needs a finer grid or a collision operator stable near τ⁺ = 0.5,
#557).