Latest Posts
COMSOL Multiphysics Version 4.4 Released Today
You’ve seen glimpses of our new software release at the COMSOL Conference and perhaps engaged in commentary around it in social media. Today marks the official release of COMSOL Multiphysics version 4.4, and you can now learn about the software updates in detail and download it if you are on subscription.
Your Room, from Interior Design to Acoustics
I recently stumbled upon a neat tool from Autodesk® called “Autodesk® Homestyler”. It’s surprising to see they have rolled out a tool that is more entertaining than utilitarian, but if a CAD company were to develop something fun for the general population, I suppose an interior design app makes sense. We took it for a test-drive. Here’s how it went.
The Next Generation of Moore’s Law
At the COMSOL Conference in Boston, Lam Research Corporation held a keynote talk about Moore’s law and its role in computational modeling. The keynote touched on how Moore’s law has not only impacted the advancement of simulation tools, but also how the development of these tools have themselves allowed Moore’s law to hold true. The concept was something that interested me, and I know it’s been on the minds of many electrical engineers as well. Case in point, when browsing […]
Load Ramping of Nonlinear Problems
As we saw previously in the blog entry on Solving Nonlinear Static Finite Element Problems, not all nonlinear problems will be solvable via the damped Newton-Raphson method. In particular, choosing an improper initial condition or setting up a problem without a solution will simply cause the nonlinear solver to continue iterating without converging. Here we introduce a more robust approach to solving nonlinear problems.
Why All These Stresses and Strains?
In structural mechanics you will come across a plethora of stress and strain definitions. It may be a Second Piola-Kirchhoff Stress or a Logarithmic Strain. In this blog post we will investigate these quantities, discuss why there is a need for so many variations of stresses and strains, and illuminate the consequences for you as a finite element analyst. The defining tensor expressions and transformations can be found in many textbooks, as well as through some web links at the […]
Coupling Transport and Solid Mechanics Models for Better Puffed Rice
In my work at COMSOL, it’s always interesting to see how broad the field of heat transfer can be. Far from being limited to steel ingots and CPU fans, researchers often use COMSOL Multiphysics to study heat transfer in food manufacturing. One good example of this is the study of thermal and mechanical effects in the production of puffed rice, which was presented at the COMSOL Conference 2013 in Boston.
Solving Nonlinear Static Finite Element Problems
Here, we begin an overview of the algorithms used for solving nonlinear static finite element problems. This information is presented in the context of a very simple 1D finite element problem, and builds upon our previous entry on Solving Linear Static Finite Element Models.
Mersen Simulates Joule Heating in Busbars and Fuses
Joule heating is a fairly standard type of simulation for COMSOL users nowadays. It involves solving for electrical voltage and temperature fields simultaneously with highly temperature-dependent material properties. Controlling Joule heating is very important when designing and manufacturing electrical systems components. The electric protection group at manufacturing company Mersen France used to base their busbar and fuse designs on trial-and-error, but these days they turn to COMSOL Multiphysics.