Kratos Structure: Elements and Conditions

Elements and conditions are the objects that contain most of the physics of the problem. An element contains all the information related to an individual finite element in the mesh, and its main functionality is to provide that element's local contributions to the system matrices and vectors. Each condition represents a face of a finite element that is contained in the boundary of the model, and is used to implement boundary conditions.

While both elements and conditions have practically the same interface, they are implemented as separate objects to emphasize the conceptual difference between them. Both elements and conditions can store variables but, unlike the nodes, they only have a non-historical database.