WELCOMES TO Z88 !

Z88 for Windows and LINUX/UNIX is Freeware and is protected by the GNU General Public License, see next pages.

Z88 is compact and fast and was developed for PCs initially. Today, Z88 runs properly on PCs with LINUX and Windows starting with Windows95 to Vista and UNIX computers, however. Simple to compile and to install. Handling is simple. Z88 comes with context sensitive online-help and a user-friendly command processor. Successfully proved by countless Windows-, UNIX- and LINUX installations worldwide. For static calculations in mechanical engineering and building & construction industries. Absolutely transparent for the user as input and output are handled by text files.

Z88 has deliberately been designed as a compact and fast system. Thus, its use is restricted to static calculations. Z88 does not want to compete with professional FEA programs for workstation or mainframes which can do really everything, but are hardly payable and complicated to operate. While you are still puzzling about installation and start of some programs of this genre also in the PC class, you have already calculated the first examples with Z88. And the online-help is always only one keystroke or mouse click away. The Z88 system may operate with English or German language depending on your setting (ENGLISH or GERMAN) in the file Z88.DYN.

The new version 13 looks quite similar to version 13 but the plot program is enhanced and two sparse matrix solvers with improved speed are included. In addition, now complete 64 bit support is supplied for Windows, LINUX and UNIX. Thus, you may compute FE structures with millions of DOF with an ordinary PC. Z88 for Windows comes ready-to-run for 32 bit XP and Vista and for 64 bit Vista and Windows server, too. The LINUX version should be compiled on your system, however, and uses now GTK+ instead of Motif.

If you already have FEA experiences, you can start at once. If you are a beginner in this area, i would recommend secondary literature. Here are a few choices:

Z ienkiewicz, O.C.; Taylor, R.L.: The Finite Element Method, Volumes 1-3, 5th edition, Butterworth- Heinemann and John Wiley & Sons, 2000
Bathe,K.J.: Finite Elemente Procedures. Prentice Hall, 1995
Rieg,F.; Hackenschmidt, R.: Finite Elemente Analyse für Ingenieure. Hanser- Verlag, München Wien 2009, 3rd edition (in German language)

If you’ll improve Z88 please give me your feedback. If you want to compile Z88 for UNIX any C compiler along with a GTK+ and a OpenGL library should work fine. If you want to compile Z88 for Windows any kind of C or C++ compiler should work fine - i've tested the free LCC and the C/C++ compilers from Microsoft and Intel.

And because Z88 is bound to the GNU General Public License you are to present your improvements and modifications to the public including the source code - that's a point of honor. Promote the idea of the free software according to GNU-GPL! Please see www.z88.de.

Professor Dr. Frank Rieg Bayreuth, December 2008

Lehrstuhl Konstruktionslehre und CAD

(Chair for Engineering Design and CAD)

University of Bayreuth, Germany

www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/konstruktionslehre
University of Bayreuth
frank.rieg@uni-bayreuth.de