consistent units check

[franaudo]

most FEA software are unit-independent, but you still need to be consistent with the unit chosen. For example, if you use mm, s, ton then you need to specify stresses in MPa. This can be a huge source of errors, especially when the target user is not an engineer.

I am thinking of adding an (optional) parameter to the Model class to specify the units to be used for consistency checks.
These checks can be done for example by comparing the order of magnitude of certain elements (for example, the width and height of a section, or the density of a material) and pop up warnings in the log files.

I have also found this very interesting library: https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/0.10.1/tutorial.html
with this library, it is very easy to convert units and even use not-consistent units at the same time (the conversion happens in the background)

[rjodon]

I skimmed through Pint documentation, it sounds pretty sweet. However, be careful that unit conversion could go wrong between metric <-> Imperial if the number of digits is not enough and/or if we can't control it (I could not see yet a place where we define it in the API).

That's how we blow a rocket or crash a probe on a planet surface... :D