Release notes

Elementarium updates in place: there is no installer, no version to download and no upgrade fee. New versions appear the next time you load the app. This page records what changed and, more importantly, whether it changes any number in a model you have already solved.

How to read these notes

Each entry is tagged so you can judge quickly whether it affects work you have already issued:

Anything tagged Results affected deserves attention before you re-issue a report generated with an earlier version. The model is the current one and so is the solver, so a re-run after such a change is a genuinely different calculation. Design checks are the exception: a check is pinned to the version of the module it was created with, so it resolves the same implementation until you upgrade it deliberately.

Since 0.5.0 — 2026-10-13

Live in the studio, and to be folded into the next numbered release.

• Improved — the shell element is reworked. Bending and transverse shear are MITC4 as before; the membrane gains four enhanced strain modes, so walls and deep beams bend in their own plane without locking; the drilling rotation is tied to the membrane's own rotation (Hughes–Brezzi) instead of a spring to the ground, so it no longer depends on the units or stiffens a curved shell; and warped elements are corrected, so twisted and doubly curved surfaces no longer lock. The standard shell benchmarks, Scordelis–Lo roof, pinched hemisphere and cylinder and twisted beam among them, are now in the solver's test suite.
• Results affected — any model with walls, cores, deep beams or curved shells. In-plane deflections of a coarsely meshed wall grow towards the exact value, by up to about 45 % on a wall one element deep (99 % of the exact deflection instead of 68 %), and membrane forces and the moments at beam-to-wall joints redistribute with them. Curved and twisted shells soften towards the published benchmark values. A flat slab loaded only out of its plane keeps its bending results.
• New — steel member buckling to EN 1993-1-1 §6.3: flexural, torsional and lateral-torsional buckling, and the 6.3.3 interaction with the Annex B factors. Class 4 sections are verified on their effective section, and slender webs for shear buckling to EN 1993-1-5 §5. Buckling lengths come from the member, from a stability analysis, or from an end-restraint estimate.
• New — AISC 360 Chapter E: flexural and torsional buckling (E3, E4) and members with slender elements (E7), feeding the H1-1 interaction.
• Results affected — both arrive as new modules, ec3.member-resistance and aisc360.member-resistance, which new checks use. An existing check keeps its module and its numbers, and offers the upgrade; taking it raises the utilisation of every compression member it covers. See Module versions.
• New — serviceability checks: member deflection to the national annex tables, EN 1990:2023, IBC Table 1604.3 or EN 1995-1-1 with creep; storey and overall drift to EN 1990 or AISC 360; and a floor-frequency screen. Each limit is checked on the combination type it is written for.
• Improved — the design-check dialog is reworked: setup, scope and results on separate tabs, strength and serviceability checks side by side, and the governing η at a glance.
• New — loads in local axes: uniform, linear, surface, graded and edge loads take a Global / Local switch, carried through the solver, the tables, the report, IFC and SAF.
• Improved — a reworked load editor that draws the load on the member's real geometry, with a start / end table for varying loads; member loads are drawn as bands and surface loads as volumes in the viewports.
• New — splitters snap to quarters, thirds and halves while you drag them, and read the split out.
• Improved — on phones, a Properties panel built for thumbs, and an editor that steps aside for the keyboard.
• Fixed — viewers keep their proportions when the Properties panel opens or closes; pinned table columns stay pinned through a long horizontal scroll.

0.5.0 — 2026-10-12

Faster multigrid, and a live solve monitor.

• Improved — the multigrid (AMG) preconditioner runs on every core. Its new default smoother is fully threaded; the old one ran on one core and slowed down several times over when threaded.
• Improved — multigrid accounts for the structure's rigid-body modes, so it typically converges in tens of iterations, and on one core it is two to three times faster than the default solver.
• Improved — multigrid solves load cases together: 1.2–1.7× faster on models with several load cases.
• Improved — the iterative solvers use the processor's vector (SIMD) instructions when they solve several load cases at once.
• New — the solve monitor: live progress per load case, a convergence chart, solver statistics and a Stop button.
• New — how many processor threads the solver uses is a setting. See Solver threads.
• Improved — the status bar fills up as a solve progresses, and says Meshing… while the mesh is rebuilt.
• Fixed — changing the mesh settings no longer leaves the status bar on Checking results… or flashes Out of date.

0.4.0 — 2026-10-08

A faster solver. Large models solve two to four times faster.

• Improved — the default iterative solver runs every step of each iteration on all cores, not only the matrix product: 2.4–3.1× faster on large plates.
• Improved — the stiffness matrix no longer stores the zeros inside each node, so the direct solvers ($LD{L}^{\mathsf{T}}$, $L{L}^{\mathsf{T}}$) are 2.7–3.7× faster. Modal, buckling and second-order analyses use the smaller matrix as well. The matrix is the same matrix without its stored zeros, so results are unchanged.

A simply supported plate under uniform pressure, assembly included; best of three runs on an 8-thread desktop CPU. Times on your machine and model will differ.

0.3.1 — 2026-10-08

Comments, version history and structure generators. The editor now works on phones and tablets too.

• New — comments pinned to the model, with @mentions and notifications.
• New — version history: browse, preview, save and restore earlier versions of a project.
• New — 35 structure generators: trusses, frames, arches, grids, towers, domes and shells, for a new project or inserted into the current model.
• New — wind and snow load generators to EN 1991-1-4 and EN 1991-1-3.
• New — US customary units.
• New — mechanisms are found before solving, with their motion shown on the model; member releases are drawn too.
• New — deformed and mode shapes animate, and the animation records to video.
• New — IFC import and export of the structural analysis view.
• New — a road overpass example; every example opens already solved, and examples solve again at any size, with no plan limit.
• New — send bug reports and ideas from inside the app.
• Improved — the 2D viewer shows any plane with the same layers as 3D, and diagram values stay apart at joints.
• Improved — locate the overall maximum and minimum of a result on the model.
• Improved — a touch-friendly editor on phones and tablets.
• Improved — tables pick nodes and load targets in the viewport, and list the loads on nodes, members and plates.
• Improved — trackpad sideways pan, right-drag pan with the Move tool, and double-click to fit.
• Improved — faster start-up, with one loader from the click to a working editor.
• Improved — new projects open with the structure beside its ULS displacement.
• Fixed — plane models (2D trusses, 2D frames and grillages) hold the degrees of freedom they do not use on every node, so the model check no longer reports every node as free out of plane.
• Fixed — many fixes to results, the 2D viewer and the deformed shape: trusses stay straight and hinges stay where they are.

0.3.0 — 2026-09-28

A much faster solver, results on demand.

• Improved — all load cases are solved together on one factorisation, several times faster on models with many cases or combinations.
• Improved — member forces, plate results and the error estimate are computed when a view asks for them, not with every solve; switching plots never solves again.
• Improved — results are kept on the device and come back instantly after a reload, even for large models.
• Improved — the status bar shows how long a full solve takes, when the results were computed, and how long each result took to read.
• Improved — the error estimate is exact for load combinations, and singular corners no longer inflate the totals.
• Fixed — envelopes of principal plate forces and moments now come from a single governing combination. Before, the two principal values could come from different combinations.
• New — section editor: built-up sections, outline editing and DXF import. See Sections and materials.
• New — an extremes panel, and table rows that highlight in the viewers when you hover them.
• New — student accounts.
• Improved — numbers are shown to a set number of significant digits.
• New — if the app fails to start after an update, it clears its cached files and reloads by itself; Settings › Stored on this device › App files does the same by hand.

0.2.0 — 2026-08-05

Release notes, and a model check before every solve.

• New — the app announces what changed after it updates itself, and the notes can be reopened any time from the user menu.
• New — models are checked for rigid-body motion before solving, so an under-restrained structure is reported with the node and direction instead of silently returning zeros. See Singular stiffness matrix.
• Improved — the version number shown across the app comes from one place. It is in the status bar, and worth quoting in a bug report.

0.1.0 — 2026-07-01

First public preview: modelling, analysis and results in the browser.

Still to land

A Winkler bed under the face of a slab or raft is not switched on yet. Line supports — a stiffness per unit length along a member or along one edge of a slab — are live. Where the knowledge base describes the area case it says so on the page. Nothing else is gated.

Public beta

Elementarium is in public beta. The current release provides:

• Modeling — bars, beams and 3D frames; slabs, walls and shells on a MITC4 element, with meshing; supports, springs, line supports, releases and rigid arms; load panels; DXF reference drawings; 35 structure generators; IFC and SAF import and export; SI and US customary units.
• Analysis — linear static, modal, linear buckling and second-order, solved locally in the browser on up to eight threads, with a live solve monitor.
• Loading — load cases, groups and automatic combination generation to EN 1990 and ASCE 7, with envelopes; wind and snow generated to EN 1991-1-4 and EN 1991-1-3; member and plate loads in global or local axes.
• Results — diagrams, contours and tables; deformed shapes, modes and mechanisms animated and recorded to video; mechanisms found before every solve.
• Design checks — steel to EN 1993-1-1 §6.2–6.3 and to AISC 360 Ch. D–H, with clause-level traceability and national annex parameters; serviceability — deflection, drift and a floor-frequency screen.
• Reporting — traceable PDF calculation packages assembled from the solved model.
• Collaboration — real-time shared editing and offline working with conflict-free merge; version history and comments pinned to the model.

Not yet available, in roughly the order they are being worked on: a Winkler bed under a raft face, concrete design to EN 1992-1-1, section cuts and design strips, material and contact nonlinearity, a scripting API (the scripting console that ships today is a command line for adding nodes and members, not an API), and further design codes and national annexes.

Reporting a problem

Defect reports from engineers are how most of these entries come to exist. If a result disagrees with a hand calculation or a published benchmark, send the project and the comparison to [email protected] — during the beta it reaches the person who wrote the solver, and is answered within one working day.