Dassault Systèms offers Abaqus, FEA for FREE! The student edition is great to learn Abaqus and for personal pet projects. It’s also great resume fodder too. The major difference from the commercial version is that it is has a limitation of 1000 nodes. We will go through the simple steps to get up and running.

This is the link you are probably looking for. (personally this is what I jump to frequently)

With regards to licensing it’s a little confusing. Over the years I have heard anything from:

It’s for current students

Free for non-commercial use

Free for anything

Make sure you read skim the ‘Abaqus 6.14 Student Edition Software License Agreement.pdf’. I think this is the most important line ‘You MAY NOT: (1) Use Abaqus Student Edition for commercial purposes’. I loosely translate this to mean for fun and not profit.

Finding the Student Edition

OK so now that’s cleared up here we go.

There are several places that you can find the student edition. The one you will find by googling ‘abaqus student edition’ is http://academy.3ds.com/software/simulia/abaqus-student-edition/ where the files are hosted. This link asks if you are a student or teacher. If either is true you can scroll down to the ‘If you are a Student or Teacher’ section. If this is not true for you then it is also hosted in the swYm community here. You will need a swYm account which is basically a forum for all DS related stuff. I can never remember where it is so this post is as much for me to find it again as for you. If you have chosen this path please skip down to ‘If you are NOT a Student or Teacher.

If you are a Student or Teacher

http://academy.3ds.com/software/simulia/abaqus-student-edition/

Follow the hoops, hurdles and prompts and download.

If you are NOT a Student or Teacher

swYm community here.

Click on this image.

Follow the hoops, hurdles and prompts and download.

Installation

After downloading the 1.8GB SIMULIA_Abaqus_6.14__6.14-1_.Abaqus_6.14-2SE_win86_64.exe file. Double click and you will be given a prompt ‘Click Yes to download and install Abaqus Student Edition’?? I thought we already downloaded it. Click ‘yes’ and it will start extracting the files. Click through the prompts. The only real decision is if you want you temp directory someplace else. I choose d:\temp since my solid state drive on C: is fairly full.

My install didn’t create an icon on the desktop which may be because I’m on unsupported Windows 10. To create one browse to: C:\SIMULIA\Abaqus\Commands and copy ‘abq6142se.bat’. Then right click on the desktop and select ‘Paste shortcut’. To fix up this shortcut right click it and go to ‘Properties’. Under ‘Target’ add ” cae || pause” to the end so it now reads “C:\SIMULIA\Abaqus\Commands\abq6142se.bat cae || pause”. Change ‘Start in’ to read the location that you set for the temp folder. For me this is “D:\temp”. If you have OCD like me you will also want to change the icon by clicking ‘Change Icon’. Browse to “C:\SIMULIA\Abaqus\Commands\” and select “abq6142se.ico”

All Done

Now you should be all set to use the Abaqus Student Edition. I hope you found this helpful. Please share this link if you think it will help others. If you would like a free trial of the commercial version or a quote please contact me. We have a ‘No Muss No Fuss’ quoting method. Thank you.

Rob Stupplebeen

Rob@OptimalDevice.com