Discussion Forum

I am an undergraduate student at University of Maryland, College Park. I am in a capstone research group, where we are designing a smart window device that consists of stacked layers enclosed in glass. When we apply a small voltage to the device, the device becomes partially transparent, and when in the off-state, the device is practically fully reflective.

Our team is required to have modeling work of our device, and we want to use the COMSOL 4.4 Wave Optics Module to model the transmission and reflectance vs. wavelength of light. We are all new to COMSOL, where we just recently have acquired our license, and we have been running through tutorials to learn the software.

I can provide more info on our device if needed.

We were wondering if anyone could steer us in the right direction on how to set up our model, including any parameters, variables, and equations/functions we would be using to solve for the transmission and reflectance. We were also wondering about mesh info.

One of the tutorials we went through seemed similar to what we want to do.
The description is: A plane electromagnetic wave propagating through free space is incident at an angle
upon an infinite dielectric medium. This model computes the reflection and
transmission coefficients and compares the results to the Fresnel equations.
The link to it is: www.comsol.com/model/download/187137/models.woptics.fresnel_equations.pdf

It seems to need to add boundary conditions to our model, as well as ports to set-up the wave propagation into our material. The model we followed used a parametric sweep with a direct solver.

Any help/info on how to model transmission vs wavelength for a stack of layers would be much appreciated.!