A little while ago, Chris was talking about courses and training for FEM modeling (things like Sonnet or OpenEMS for RF modeling mostly, I think it was). Elmer is another open-source tool in that space, and there’s a series of (free) weekly training webinars on it starting next week. Might be of interest? (I don’t know what the quality of the tool is compared to the commercial offerings or other open-source things, but some of the webinar titles look interesting: the last one is “Industrial applications-oriented, microwave modeling in Elmer”.)
I would be interested, had they not taken place at 5am, my time.
My only real exposure to Elmer was that a former colleague (3 years ago?) mentioned having used it. If memory serves, he said he was impressed by its power, but found it taking a long time to learn. I ran into issues trying to install it, and at the time I never had time to resolve the blockages, and later I solved the problem I was working on through other methods, and haven’t gone back to trying to use Elmer.
A very knowledgeable guy I worked with briefly is now doing some webinars with his new consulting company and they’re very informative. One of them is using FEMM for modelling - more useful for magnetics / power than RF, but maybe it could be applied to more situations. Might be worth checking out. FEMM is free and open-source;