Comsol announces Multiphysics 4.0 beta edition

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 20, 2009

Comsol has released the beta edition of Comsol Multiphysics 4.0, its multiphysics modelling and simulation environment.

Version 4.0 delivers the Comsol Desktop, a new user interface that is designed to allow users to easily build and run simulations.

'With the new Comsol Desktop environment, we're making it easier for more engineers to apply multiphysics to more applications,' said Svante Littmarck, president and chief executive of Comsol.

'The Comsol Desktop streamlines the modelling process for a broad user base.

'This unified interface is built for cross-disciplinary applications and is quick to learn,' he added.

The Comsol Desktop allows the user to organise the work flow and gives a clean overview of the modelling process.

Users can set up the desktop's appearance using its docked window placement capabilities that include the main menu, model builder and a help desk, as well as settings, messages and graphics windows.

The model builder brings a dynamic model configuration approach to simulations.

Users can right click to perform common tasks such as importing CAD, meshing, specifying material properties, solving and plotting results.

If changes need to be made, the model builder provides access to any part of the model settings.

Users can record and save the steps of the set-up to use sequentially as a model is automatically re-evaluated and refined.

Dynamically updated context-dependent help enables easy browsing and extends the search functionality.

CAD interoperability remains a top priority to provide the best path for CAD users to connect to Comsol Multiphysics for their simulations.

To this end, Comsol has released the Livelink for PTC Pro/Engineer.

By establishing association between the two geometry representations, changing a feature in the CAD model automatically updates the Comsol geometry accordingly.

This enables multiphysics simulation involving parametric sweeps and design optimisation directly from within Pro/Engineer.

Versions of Livelink for Solidworks and Autodesk Inventor are already available as optional add-ons to Comsol Multiphysics.

Comsol Multiphysics version 4.0 expands the geometry functionality by its CAD import module, which is based on the Parasolid Editor geometry kernel from Siemens PLM Software.

Users are provided with CAD tools that support Parasolid-based geometry operations directly in the Comsol Desktop.

All solid operations are associative and now allow for multi-parameter sweeps over any group of geometry dimensions.

Geometry models created from scratch or modified CAD models can be saved to Parasolid format directly.

Comsol Multiphysics version 4.0 supports parallel processing on standard multi-core computers as well as distributed memory systems (clusters).

This means that users can turn to the already available implementation of shared memory on clusters to solve a series of identical parameterised models, one per computational node, or solve a single large model using distributed memory.

The Comsol cluster implementation can utilise shared memory multi-core processors on each computer or node in combination with the cluster distributed memory system.

Version 4 supports Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Windows HPC Server 2008 and Linux.

Users can expect accelerated development of new cluster support in future versions of Comsol Multiphysics.