Software boosts physics simulation

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 includes fluid dynamic solver methods for simulating very large problems in chemical engineering, heat transfer, or microfluidics applications

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 is an engineering and scientific software environment for modelling and simulating any physics-based system.

Multicore processor support provides engineers and scientists with unprecedented performance, solver speed and accuracy in multiphysics simulations.

In addition to applying parallel computing throughout the solution process, Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 includes fluid dynamic solver methods for simulating very large problems in chemical engineering, heat transfer, or microfluidics applications.

Its suite of discipline-specific modules have been enhanced for chemical engineering, RF, reaction engineering and structural mechanics.

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 delivers high computational speed with multicore processors and shared-memory parallelism.

Every step of the simulation workflow now executes in parallel.

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 will use the maximum number of cores available on the system, and users have complete control over the number of processors dedicated to their simulations.

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 provides fully parallelised meshing for assemblies straight out of the box.

A boundary layer meshing feature enables users to mesh thermal boundary layers, charged double layers in AC/DC applications, or viscous boundary layers in fluid-flow applications more efficiently, with greater accuracy, and with less memory consumption than previously possible.

An upgrade to Comsol Multiphysics' iterative methods improves solver performance for fluid dynamics.

Galerkin Least Squares (GLS) stabilisation techniques complement Comsol's iterative solvers, enabling engineers and scientists to compute large fluid flow problems with millions of degrees of freedom.

A segregated solver with an easy to use interface reduces memory consumption significantly when computing large problems, such as fluid-structure interaction (FSI) or wave propagation in thermally deformed structures.

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 solves fluid-flow problems up to five times faster than its predecessors.

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 also offers users a new suite of post-processing tools for computing geometric properties such as volume, area, centre of gravity and moment of inertia.

Even simulation results can be presented in new ways with version 3.4's expanded palette of colour scales.

Users of the Comsol Chemical Engineering and Heat Transfer Modules can now step up their simulations to include variable-density flow and free convection.

Engineers will find these new capabilities particularly useful when solving coupled flow and conjugate heat transfer problems commonly encountered in electronic cooling and heat exchanger analyses.

For applications such as microfluidics, multi-species convection, and reacting flows, Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 has been enhanced with additional multiphysics modelling interfaces for turbulent and laminar flow with variable densities due to variations in composition.

The Chemical Engineering Module has been improved with a powerful modelling interface for the simulation of multiphase flow.

With it, users can now simulate bubbly flows such as in scrubbers, aerators, bioreactors and food-processing equipment effortlessly.

Users can also set up mixture models for simulating emulsification, sedimentation and other separation processes common in the chemical, pharmaceutical and food-processing industries.

The Heat Transfer Module has been greatly enhanced by the introduction of boundary layer meshing and by improvements to Comsol's solver technology.

Boundary layer meshing provides engineers and scientists with greater accuracy yet requires fewer elements for simulating electronic cooling, heat exchangers, and heat losses to solid structures in mechanical design.

Also new in the Heat Transfer Module is the ability to model 3D surface-to-surface radiation using memory-saving 2D axisymmetric modelling domain.

Upgrades to the Comsol Reaction Engineering Lab include an interface for running nonlinear parameter estimations on multiple sets of experimental data.

In addition, it is now possible to select which parameters to estimate and which parameters to keep constant in each estimation run.

Outputs now display with confidence intervals and standard deviations.

Version 3.4 makes it easy to build and run Comsol models as part of Spice-based circuit simulations thanks to the AC/DC Module's new Spice user interface.

Another new feature for electronics, electrical components, geophysics and electrochemistry applications is small-signal analysis for AC impedance studies.

Users can also easily model electric motors and generators through a new interface supporting periodic boundary conditions and sector symmetry.

Additionally, a new periodic boundary condition user interface has been introduced in the RF Module along with an improved interface for lumped port boundary conditions, which is ideal for wave propagation in transmission lines and circuit boards.

The Comsol Multiphysics Structural Mechanics Module now lets users predict high and low-cycle fatigue damage.

A suite of Comsol Script functions calculate fatigue damage from inputs made up of loading data and deterministic, stochastic or even nonproportional material fatigue data.

Comsol Multiphysics 3.4 runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris and the Macintosh workstations with a minimum of 1Gbyte of memory.

Back to top