Getting started¶

This section introduces numgeo-ACT and walks you through your first calibration.

What you need¶

numgeo-ACT orchestrates element-test simulations and an optimizer around your laboratory data. To run a calibration you need three ingredients:

1. numgeo — the finite-element solver that simulates each laboratory test. numgeo-ACT calls it as an external program, so the numgeo executable must be available on your system PATH. See the numgeo documentation for installation.
2. A Python environment with numgeo-ACT and its dependencies (NumPy, SciPy, pandas, openpyxl, matplotlib). See Installation & requirements.
3. Your experimental database — a single Excel workbook containing one sheet per laboratory test, formatted so the reader can interpret it. See Experimental data and download the template.

The idea in one paragraph¶

You tell numgeo-ACT which constitutive model to calibrate and which of its parameters are free (to be optimized) versus fixed. Each free parameter is constrained to a search interval — a lower and upper bound. The DEEM optimizer then proposes parameter sets, simulates every selected laboratory test with numgeo, and measures how well each simulation matches your experiment using a similarity measure. These per-test scores are combined — using weights you control — into a single objective value. The optimizer minimizes this value and returns the best parameter set, together with a report and comparison plots.

Where to go next¶