PolyFEM¶

A polyvalent C++ and Python FEM library.

Logo

New to PolyFEM? Start with a working example

Run your first PolyFEM simulation — a complete walkthrough with prebuilt binaries, downloadable JSON and mesh files, a first solve, visualization, and an elasticity follow-up.

Prefer not to build from source? Download a platform package from the latest successful Artifacts workflow (Linux x86-64, macOS ARM64, or Windows AMD64).

Already familiar with finite elements? Jump to the full Getting Started tutorial, JSON input guide, or generated JSON specification.

PolyFEM is a simple C++ and Python finite element library. We provide a wide set of common PDEs including:

Laplace
Helmholtz
Linear Elasticity
St. Venant–Kirchhoff Elasticity
Neo-Hookean Elasticity
Stokes
Navier–Stokes

PolyFEM simplicity lies in the interface: just pick a problem, select some boundary condition, and solve. No need to construct complicated function spaces, or learn a new scripting language: everything is set-up trough a JSON interface or through the Setting class in python.

For instance, PolyFEM seamlessly integrates quad/hexes and tri/tets of order up to 4, and integrates state-of-the-art techniques such as the adaptive \(p\)-refinement presented in “Decoupling Simulation Accuracy from Mesh Quality” or the spline and polygonal bases in “Poly-Spline Finite-Element Method”.

The library is actively used in our research so expect frequent updates, fixes, and new features!

News¶

Recent developments from the PolyFEM project. For development activity beyond these highlights, see the commit history and pull requests.

November 2, 2026 — JSON builder added to the documentation. The website navigation now includes a JSON builder page. Website change.
July 29, 2026 — Fluid–structure interaction (FSI) support. PolyFEM merged a coupled Navier–Stokes/solid mechanics implementation, including interface coupling forms and associated tests. Pull request #525.
October 30, 2026 — Legacy-code cleanup. The no-legacy changes were merged into PolyFEM. Pull request #555.
October 28, 2026 — Macro strain moved to the variational-form implementation. Periodic macro-strain simulations now route through the nonlinear-elasticity variational form. Pull request #546.
October 23, 2026 — Extremum Sum Potential integrated. A new contact formulation based on Extremum Sum Proximity Potential was merged. Pull request #542.

See earlier announcements or the v0.5 release for historical information.

PolyFEM in C++¶

For more details refer to the C++ section

Download or compile¶

Prebuilt PolyFEM executable packages are available for Linux x86-64, macOS ARM64, and Windows AMD64 as GitHub Actions artifacts. Choose a successful run on main, download the corresponding artifact, and see the first-run guide for a complete example. These are CI artifacts, not tagged releases.

If you are modifying PolyFEM or need to build on a different platform, all the C++ dependencies required to build the code are included. It should work on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and it should build out-of-the-box with CMake:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

Usage¶

The main executable, ./PolyFEM_bin, can be called as a command-line interface. Simply run:

./PolyFEM_bin --help

PolyFEM in Python¶

For more details refer to the Python section

Installation¶

We are making efforts to provide a simple python interface to Polyfem.

For doing so, we are maintaining a conda package that can be easily installed https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/polyfempy.

conda install -c conda-forge polyfempy

Usage¶

Simply import the package!

import polyfempy

PolySolve¶

PolyFEM heavily depends on external libraries for solving linear systems. If you need a linear system wrapper based on Eigen (but do not need the finite element setup) you use PolySolve.

Citation¶

If you use PolyFEM in your project, please consider citing our work:

@misc{polyfem,
  author = {Teseo Schneider and Jérémie Dumas and Xifeng Gao and Denis Zorin and Daniele Panozzo},
  title = {{PolyFEM}},
  howpublished = "\url{https://polyfem.github.io/}",
  year = {2019},
}

@article{Schneider:2019:PFM,
  author = {Schneider, Teseo and Dumas, J{\'e}r{\'e}mie and Gao, Xifeng and Botsch, Mario and Panozzo, Daniele and Zorin, Denis},
  title = {Poly-Spline Finite-Element Method},
  journal = {ACM Trans. Graph.},
  volume = {38},
  number = {3},
  month = mar,
  year = {2019},
  url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3313797},
  publisher = {ACM}
}

@article{Schneider:2018:DSA,
    author = {Teseo Schneider and Yixin Hu and Jérémie Dumas and Xifeng Gao and Daniele Panozzo and Denis Zorin},
    journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
    link = {},
    month = {10},
    number = {6},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)},
    title = {Decoupling Simulation Accuracy from Mesh Quality},
    volume = {37},
    year = {2018}
}

Acknowledgments & Funding¶

The software is being developed in the Geometric Computing Lab at NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the University of Victoria, Canada.

This work was partially supported by:

the NSF CAREER award 1652515
the NSF grant IIS-1320635
the NSF grant DMS-1436591
the NSF grant 1835712
the SNSF grant P2TIP2_175859
the NSERC grant RGPIN-2021-03707
the NSERC grant DGECR-2021-00461
Adobe Research
nTopology

License¶

The code of PolyFEM itself is licensed under MIT License. However, please be mindful of third-party libraries which are used by PolyFEM and may be available under a different license.

Last update: 2026-11-02