Fluid & Heat Blog Posts
A Cooling Story for These Sweltering Days
I have just come back from a bit of a vacation and boy was it hot! Here, a large part of the US has been going through record high temperatures and most of my time was spent trying to keep cool. How nice then to mention a story about cooling.
Space Fuel: Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Produce Plutonium-238
The end of July marks the beginning of a $20 million R&D project led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to produce and process plutonium-238. The U.S. space program will be using the Pu-238 that is to be produced by ORNL as fuel for future deep-space missions.
Inventing Makes use of Simulation
One of the interesting stories to come out of the latest COMSOL News concerned a couple of great researchers, Dr. Ozgur Yildirim and Dr. Zihong Guo, and how they use simulations in their inventing process. They work in an invention/prototype laboratory in Bellevue, WA for Intellectual Ventures, a global leader in the business of invention.
The Secret Sauce in the Pipe Flow Module
We developed COMSOL Multiphysics to empower the engineering and science communities with state-of-the-art simulation tools. A key ingredient of this empowerment is flexibility. COMSOL users are already well aware of the full compatibility between various physics. This means you can put any (yes, really any) combination of COMSOL physics together. But that’s not the only way our multiphysics simulation tool is flexible.
A Cool Way to Consider the Environment
According to a study done by Brunel University in the United Kingdom, the food sector is among the top five energy-consuming industries. The transportation of food, including keeping it refrigerated, is one of the larger contributing factors to this energy-consumption and subsequent greenhouse gas emissions.
Model Explains the Sinking of Bubbles in Guinness
Before you drink your next pint of Guinness, have a close look at the bubbles in the brew, and see if they sink. Apparently they do. Now a group of scientists from the University of Limerick in Ireland (where else?) has modeled the phenomenon of sinking bubbles in Guinness beer to lend weight to this finding and provide a theoretical explanation.
IEEE Spectrum’s Insert Cover Story Optimizes Electronics Cooling
The June issue of IEEE Spectrum included an insert focused on Multiphysics Simulation. This included a feature on cooling in hybrid cars, articles about metamaterials, the smart power grid, as well as biomedical applications.
News in Particle Tracing for 4.3
There are many exciting new features in the Particle Tracing Module for COMSOL Multiphysics version 4.3. The secondary particle emission feature is particularly fascinating. “This new option for the Wall Condition allows you to model filter multipliers and multipactors, which were previously very difficult to model”, says Dan Smith, Development Team Leader at COMSOL. A mathematical expression, like a logical expression containing the particle energy for instance, can be used to determine the number of secondary particles to be released. […]