User Stories

COMSOL News

Featuring exciting multiphysics applications from DuPont, Lahey Clinic, Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Shell, Siemens, Toyota, Yale, and more. Check it out here.

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	BATTERIES: Battery Simulation Propels Electric Cars in China Tianjin Institute of Power Sources Due to its size and booming economy, China is now the world’s largest auto market, and industry analysts predict sales of 20 million cars in 2012 alone. Hence, the government is looking for greener alternatives to gasoline to power their cars, trucks and buses. Although battery-driven cars today...
	Acoustics: COMSOL Acoustics Module Finite Element Modeling for Infrasound Propagation U.S. ARMY ENGINEER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT CENTER Remote monitoring of a suite of sources, both man-made and naturally occurring, are of interest to military and other government agencies. One such monitoring technology uses infrasound, or sub-audible acoustics, which can propagate tens to thousands of kilometers depending on source strength...
	NUCLEAR ENERGY: Nordic Researchers Model Deep Geologic Repository of Nuclear Waste VTT, ESPOO, FINLAND. KTH/SKB, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN As time goes on, more research groups and institutions will turn to modeling to adequately simulate the behaviour of their nuclear waste and repositories.
	BATTERIES: Modeling Thermal Runaway for Safer Lithium Ion Batteries KOBELCO RESEARCH INSTITUTE, INC. Simulation reveals the heating conditions that can lead to thermal ignition.
	Automotive: Modeling Continually Improves Advanced Materials for Automobiles GENERAL MOTORS GLOBAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, INDIA SCIENCE LAB, BANGALORE Automakers such as General Motors are playing a key role in creating the science and technology that will help shape the global future in terms of personal transport. As GM focuses on developing automotive solutions that are sustainable in terms of energy and environment, reducing weight of the...
	Automotive: Simulation Software Makes Major Contributions to Multiple Aspects of Auto-Part Design Manufacturing METELLI S.P.A. As a major supplier of automobile components, Metelli S.p.A. (Cologne, Italy) designs and manufactures brake parts, engine parts, transmission components and water pumps for OEMs as well as for the aftermarket.
	Acoustics: Excellent Sound in Every Seat in the House B&C SPEAKERS S.P.A. Projecting high-quality sound to large audiences often involves a linear array of speakers. However, to make sure that every audience member hears every word clearly and every sound with full fidelity, the wavefronts from the individual speakers inside the array must be in phase with each other,...
	Consumer Products: Simulation Helps Develop Better Household Products PROCTER & GAMBLE, POMEZIA, ITALY Modeling saves time and money manufacturing and shipping household products.
	NUCLEAR ENERGY: Modeling Nuclear Fuel Behavior for Enhanced Reactor Performance and Safety ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE OF CANADA, KINGSTON, ONTARIO Nuclear energy offers a green solution for electric power generation. Researchers at Royal Military College in Canada show how to get the most out of nuclear fuel.
	MANUFACTURING: Modeling Finds the Minimum Energy for the Best Weld ÉCOLE NATIONALE SUPÉRIEURE DE TECHNIQUES AVANCÉES PARISTECH, PARIS, FRANCE Improved welding and fabrication practices will be essential in achieving this increased life expectancy and minimizing the potential for unexpected and costly repairs and maintenance.
	Magnetics: Cooling of the Largest Magnet in the World at CERN CEA (FRENCH ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION) Modeling has proved invaluable in understanding and optimizing the processes cooling the superconducting magnets needed in the world’s most advanced particle accelerators, and COMSOL proves very attractive to researchers focused on the physics.
	Reservoir Navigation: Modeling Tools for Formation Evaluation and Reservoir Navigation BAKER HUGHES, HOUSTON, TEXAS Baker Hughes scientists turn to COMSOL Multiphysics to develop a reservoir navigation service more efficient and precise than ever before, saving customers millions of dollars.
	Aerospace: Microwaving Moondust with COMSOL NASA Cryogenic trapped water is just under the surface of lunar soil at the Moon’s poles. Microwave energy can be used to efficiently extract this water from permafrost. COMSOL permits calculation of the extraction process.
	Multiphysics: Analysis of Room Acoustics ALTASIM TECHNOLOGIES, COLUMBUS, OH & GOLDEN ACOUSTICS, DETROIT, MI COMSOL Multiphysics has been used to predict the acoustic response of rooms.
	Lighting: Multiphysics Modeling in Discharge Lighting OSRAM SYLVANIA, BEVERLY, MASSACHUSETTS Modeling is necessary because many of the key mechanisms are beyond the reach of experimental measurement techniques. Energy efficiency using HID lamps from OSRAM SYLVANIA is showcased at the Jefferson Memorial.
	Medical: Simulating Energy-Tissue Interactions for Improved Patient Outcomes COVIDIEN EBD The simulation of energy-tissue interactions is a key part of the research performed at Covidien EbD to aid product development. Mr. Ward says “COMSOL has been applied to specific problems as a flexible tool by individuals within various research and development projects.”
	Computing: High Performance Computing for the Masses MICROSOFT For scientific and engineering software companies like COMSOL, the Windows HPC server represents an out-of-the-box solution.
	Magnetics: Designing New Magnet Technology — A Multiphysics Challenge ADVANCED MAGNET LAB, PALM BAY, FLORIDA Recently, AML developed a new magnet topology — Direct Double-Helix™ (DDH) magnets — that allow for a significant increase in power density, performance in field generation, and field quality.
	Medical: Mixed Polymers Form Unique One-Piece Medical Implant CONTINUUM BLUE LTD. Continuum Blue specializes in the research, development and analysis of medical devices and implants. Having the COMSOL model and the resulting visualizations provide clear cost- and time-efficient benefits when convincing customers of the best mold process to provide a viable polymeric LARS...
	Electrical Engineering: Analysis of Transient Electric Dipole AltaSim Technologies, Columbus, OH, USA Conventional frequency domain measurements are restricted in their applicability to working on the sea floor. Studies of electric and magnetic field interaction with human tissue have suggested that exposure to continuous electromagnetic fields has a lesser effect than exposure to...
	Life science: Millipore Designs Solutions for Customers Millipore, Billerica, MA, USA Designing products for life science research involves coupling of various physics like fluid flow, optics, electromagnetics, acoustics, heat transfer and chemical engineering. The Design Engineering group at Millipore find incredible value in the ability to use COMSOL for exploring these...
	Environmental : of Environmental Progress": Modeling Helps Batteries Jump on the Train of Environmental Progress GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY To develop its own high-temperature sodium metal-chloride battery, GE formed a team spanning its Global R&D laboratories, with members in Niskayuna, NY, USA, Shanghai, PRC and Bangalore, India. This team began a close collaboration with the engineers of GE Transportation in Erie, PA, USA....
	Manufacturing: Simulation of Manufacturing Process of Ceramic Matrix Composites AltaSim Technologies, Columbus, OH, USA Application of simulation tools have allowed designers to reduce cycle time, increase part yield, and optimize the process window for CMC manufacturing. The results of analysis using COMSOL® Multiphysics have allowed AltaSim Technologies to resolve production issues with new designs...
	Chemical: Simulation Addresses Band-Broadening in HPLC Systems Waters Corp., Milford, MA, USA At Waters Corp., people who work in R&D have seen a lot of benefits from doing simulations — from understanding fundamentally what happens to guide design, prototyping, and development. It’s really about fewer prototypes; fewer design variations, which translates to shorter development...
	Heat Transfer: Ugitech optimizes steel casting process using COMSOL Multiphysics Ugitech S.A., Ugine, France Ugitech S.A., a manufacturer of stainless steel in France, has used COMSOL Multiphysics to optimize running of its continuing casting machines. In their case this means studying various cooling aspects and process speeds for each of the different steel grades the company produces.
	Semiconductors: Reduced Stresses Inside Semiconductor Chips Lead to Higher Reliability STMicroelectronics, Milan, Italy A team from STMicroelectronics and Technoprobe, Italy joined together to investigate what happens when a probe tip hits a conductive pad surface. Limiting the induced damage on the restricted surface is one of the most important targets for the Electrical Wafer Sort(EWS) process. The COMSOL...
	Aerospace: Sun-Powered Flight University Of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV researchers use multiphysics to optimize a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle. They also demonstrate that COMSOL can be used for smallscale evaluation of flying platforms, such as UAVs, and that it provides an all-inclusive way to approach a design problem and arrive at a...
	e-Book: Manager's Guide to Productivity Gains with Multiphysics Simulation Free e-Book explains how new modeling tools are enabling businesses of all sizes to cut costs and boost productivity. In four case studies, leading companies in the biomedical, electronics, oil, and printing industries describe how COMSOL Multiphysics has helped drive their business forward.
	Industrial Equipment: Qualifying COMSOL for Nuclear-Safety-Related Procedures Oak Ridge National Laboratory The verification that COMSOL Multiphysics is installed and producing the results expected by the developer is the main focus in qualifying COMSOL for nuclear-safety-related procedures. Safety analyst Jim Freels with Oak Ridge National Laboratory reports from their software quality assurance...
	Podcast: Interview with Chris Scott, Millipore, Billerica, MA Chris Scott, Manager of Design Engineering in the Bioscience Division at Millipore said "COMSOL offers a wide range of solutions in one package, which is highly beneficial for a small group working on a variety of diverse projects. With COMSOL, we learned a single, easy-to-use interface and can...
	Environmental: Multiphysics Modeling Studies New Materials that Could Revolutionize Solar Energy Fraunhofer Institute For Solar Energy Systems, Freiburg, Germany Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute For Solar Energy Systems use modeling with COMSOL to compare different polymeric collector geometries and materials for various energy carriers to reach an optimized collector design in terms of efficiency and price. They also confirmed that the design is as...
	Chemical Engineering: COMSOL Reveals How to Avoid Very Expensive Modifications to Wastewater Clarifier Witteveen+Bos, Deventer, The Netherlands A group of consulting engineers used COMSOL Multiphysics® and the Mixture Model application mode at a wastewater treatment plant to determine that simply adding a certain chemical to improve flock (flocculent) was cheaper than making physical modifications to its clarifier tanks. Thus, modeling...
	Education: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Puts COMSOL to the Test Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute According to Professor Plawsky, modeling and simulation software is an essential part of the modern-day engineer’s toolkit, which is why integrating software into the curriculum at Rensselaer is a priority. “COMSOL is something that chemical engineers can jump right into and readily use."
	Education: Engineers Advance Skills Rensselaer at Hartford Keeping your engineering skills up to date and career on track requires constant learning. When it comes to continuing education for professional engineers, perhaps no institution offers a greater degree of engineering expertise and flexibility than Rensselaer at Hartford, Connecticut, a branch...
	Manufacturing: Fluid-Structure-Acoustic Interactions AltaSim Technologies, Columbus, OH, USA The results of fully coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction analyses have allowed AltaSim Technologies to resolve performance issues with new products prior to mass production, significantly reducing the time and cost of new product development and manufacture.
	Teaching: University brings PDEs to Life in Undergraduate Education Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ An undergraduate heat transfer course uses COMSOL Multiphysics to help students design the cooling of a motorcycle engine block. Students were able to create their designs in the SolidWorks CAD package, and then bring these into the COMSOL modeling environment. Here, they could easily perform...
	Aerospace Industry: Instrumentation Modeling for NASA’s Next Mars Rover Mission Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, USA Scheduled to launch in the fall of 2009 with the goal of reaching Mars in October 2010, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic rover that will look for signs of habitable environments on the Red Planet. One of the instruments selected to fly aboard the MSL is the Chemistry and...
	Acoustics: Analysis of unique loudspeaker driver possible only with multiphysics modeling SFX Technologies Ltd. SFX Technologies Ltd. is using COMSOL Multiphysics to design a new type of loudspeaker driver that uses virtually any surface to produce high-quality sound. In doing so, COMSOL Multiphysics and the Acoustics Module are used to find the optimal assembly of the transducer.
	Computational Science: Simulations Tackle Ever More Complex Problems Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland In 1949, Professor Stiefel rented the Zuse Z4 for complex calculations. It used 2200 relays and a mechanical memory of 64 words. He first used this machine to solve a 4th order partial differential equation related to the damming of a water reservoir and to solve a system of eight...
	Fluid-structure Interaction: A numerical wind tunnel for sail design Università "Roma Tre", Rome, Italy How easy is it to set up a multiphysics model to perform the fluid-structure interaction that occurs within sail design? Professor L. Teresi decided to find out. In principle, The physics describing the structural mechanics of the sail was directly coupled to the viscous and momentum forces...
	Materials: ArcelorMittal Breaks Down the Physics of Corrosion Arcelormittal, France Researchers at Arcelormittal, France use modeling with COMSOL to better understand the mechanism behind delamination and underpaint corrosion and determine that anodic corrosion arises more in products with good adhesion whereas cathodic corrosion is more important in systems with less adhesion.
	Bio-Medical: Hi-Fi Hearing Aids with Multiphysics Modeling WIDEX A/S A privately-owned company with a world market share of approximately 10%, Widex launched the world’s first fully digital CIC (completely in the canal) hearing aid in 1997 and in 2006 released the Inteo - the first hearing-aid line with integrated signal processing. Modeling with COMSOL helped...
	Food Engineering: Simulation of Salt Diffusion in Pork using 3D Imaging Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway Simulation of salt diffusion in a pork side is a relatively complex task since such often consists of different regions of skin, meat, fat and bone; each with diffusion coefficients that can vary by orders of magnitude. Adding to this complexity is the arbitrary shape and topology of each...
	Teaching: Reaction Engineering Education in the Digital Age University of Michigan, Ann Arbour, MI University of Michigan, Ann Arbour, MI With the advent of Comsol Multiphysics and other software packages we are now able to take chemical reaction engineering (cre) to new levels of analysis in our graduate and undergraduate courses as well as for the practicing engineer. We can usually solve...
	Materials: A Model of Direct Thermal Printing ZINK Imaging , Massachusetts, USA We used multiphysics modeling to model the mechanical and thermal behavior of our direct thermal printing process and to postprocess the data. The mechanical simulation investigated the compressive contact between the platen and the print medium as well as between the medium and print head.
	Microelectronics: Modeling a Copper-deposition System Replisaurus Technologies AB, Kista, Sweden Only through advanced packaging techniques can we take advantage of state-of-the-art microelectronic devices. The flip-chip method has become a cost-effective means of erasing many packaging and thermal issues that could spell disaster for high-density, high-power integrated circuits.
	CFD: COMSOL Reveals Unknown Effects in Process Instrumentation MKS Instruments, Wilmington, MA Modeling has become invaluable in MKS Instruments' development of first-class mass-flow controllers for the process industry. They have gained a detailed understanding of the complex gas dynamics in their instruments. With that knowledge they've achieved accuracy that clearly stands out as...
	Semiconductor Manufacturer: Finding the One Solution for Multiscale Multiphysics Modeling in Wafer Processing TEL Technology Center, Albany, NY Semiconductor wafer manufacturing involves a number of processes, ranging in size from nanometers to meters. This, along with coupling the physics of chemical kinetics, EM fields and CFD, makes for one sophisticated model!
	Semiconductors: Modeling Improves Prediction of Semiconductor Lifetimes STMicroelectronics With the scaling down of semiconductor devices, current density in the metal interconnects joining individual transistors increases. Up to now, lifetime models have been based on empirical methods. Thus, an evaluation of potential failure modes is very important as STMicroelectronics brings new...
	Bioengineering: Physician Moves Modeling into Patient Care LSU School of Medicine, Shreveport, LA The image of a physician performing a bedside diagnosis might not be one that comes to mind when thinking of the typical person performing computational simulations. However, this technology has spread into so many areas and has become so accessible to the practicing scientist and engineer that...
	Biomedical Engineering: Joined at the Hip Tulane University, New Orleans, LA As part of a course in biomedical engineering, Dr. Hart gives assignments that require the students to create models in COMSOL Multiphysics. In addition, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers working under Dr. Hart use the software to find new knowledge about how bones react to physical...
	Microfluidics: Fast Protein Folding: It's a Wrap Stanford University, Stanford, CA How relaxed protein strands loop and lace or "fold" controls the form they take and the functions they perform in the human body. If the stretched out chains of amino acids slip into a particular knot you get hemoglobin that carries oxygen through the blood. A different 3D lace becomes an antibody...
	Microfluidics: MEMS Biosensor Brings about Disposable DNA Detectors Dept. Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA Wouldn't it be a great service for the diagnosing and treating genetic of diseases if physicians had a disposable instrument for detecting DNA that worked as simply and quickly as today's home-pregnancy tests? This isn´t such a farfetched proposition thanks to advances in microfluidic-based...
	Biomedical Engineering: Multidisciplinary Modeling in Biotech Applications MEDRAD's Innovations Group, Indianola, PA Much of MEDRAD´s research deals with the most efficient yet safest way to deliver diagnostic fluids into a patient´s body. And while fluid dynamics plays a crucial role in such studies, their models sometimes also involve heat transfer, electrostatics, chemical engineering, electromagnetics, and...
	Bioengineering: Multiphysics Simulations Help Keep Eyes Healthy Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Researchers have been exploring for an accurate yet non-invasive method of predicting eye diseases at earlier stages than are currently possible. One potential diagnostic method is to measure the ocular surface temperature (OST) and compare thermal variations in the eyeball to computer models as...
	Materials: Temperature Dependent Material Properties Jahm Software Inc., MA, USA It is common to use data at room temperature in a simulation because elevated temperature data could not be found. However, the effects of temperature on a given material property can be quite large and ignoring the temperature effects can lead to erroneous and misleading simulation results.
	Environmental Engineering: Next-generation Filtration Systems Fleetguard (Cummins) Inc., Nashville, TN With air pollution on the rise and the EPA heading it off with strict regulations, auto manufacturers look to multiphysics modeling to take a serious bite out of engine emissions. Fleetguard brought about a series of major advances when they began optimizing the performance of an electrostatic...
	AC/DC Heat Induction: Melt it in Mid-air EPM-Madylam Laboratory, Grenoble, France Dr. Ernst develops cold crucibles that melt incredibly hot metals and other materials without letting the melt touch the container walls. With these methods he can refine ultra-pure titanium and other materials. His approach combines electric currents, induction, heat transfer, and magnetic...
	Manufacturing: COMSOL Helps Commercialize Molding Technology RocTool, Le Bourget du Lac, France Mathematical modeling is going far beyond the R&D lab and is starting to make a real difference in manufacturing processes. Today it would be virtually impossible to adapt our process to each client's requirements without COMSOL Multiphysics.
	High Voltage Electro-Thermal & Electromagnetic Shielding Simulations: Multiphysics Electrifies Modeling in Many Scales The Saab Group, Linköping, Sweden Flexibility was required by the Saab Group who wanted to simulate the striking of airplane wings by lightning, as well as how much the shielding material around a power substation would heat up. This story shows how they could manipulate COMSOL Multiphysics and the underlying equations to do just...
	Acoustics: A Small Company Solves Global Problems Ultra Sonus AB, Öregrund, Sweden Ultrasound technology is able to produce stronger paper, reduce costs, and provide a global solution to the problem of wastewater. This has all been possible since a growing company, Ultra Sonus, Öregrund, developed a fifty year-old technology that was previously only used at the lab-scale.
	AC/DC Engineering: A New Approach to Railgun Operation Benet Laboratories, US Army Research Engineering and Development Command, Watervliet, NY Railguns-which propel a projectile using electromagnetic forces´ promise to revolutionize projectile launchers. To adequately design them, researchers must understand the inner workings of these weapons. Here, using modeling, Dr. Paul Cote makes his contribution to the understanding of this...
	Oil Prospecting: Electrical Imaging Systems Riboug Research Centre, Schlumberger, France Drilling an oil well requires a good knowledge of the subsoil. Electrical imaging provides a fuzzy picture of underground structures, which needs to be improved in order to receive a decent knowledge of the subsoil. Experts at Schlumberger carry out simulations with COMSOL Multiphysics to sharpen...
	Automotive: Multiphysics Sparks Innovation in Engine Design TRW Automotive, Barsinghausen, Germany TRW Automotive Engine Components develops, tests and manufactures components for electromagnetic valve-train systems. To optimize the electromagnets and speed this technology to market, TRW engineers found that simulating the electromagnetic properties of their systems to be very helpful.
	Civil Engineering: A Close Up on COMSOL for Soil-sensor Design TransTech Systems, Inc., Schenectady, NY Ronald W. Gamache is the director of Research and Development with TransTech Systems, Inc. The company offers a wide range of products for asphalt paving and has achieved a worldwide reputation for innovation across various levels of the roadbuilding industry. By using COMSOL they acquired new...
	Biomedical Engineering: Electrical Signals in a Heart Università Campus Biomedico di Roma, Rome, Italy Making sense of the contractions and dilations in the heart requires far more than simply considering how mechanical deformations force blood through hollows in cardiac tissue. Also to be considered is the transfer of charged ions in heart tissue that produces electrical pulses to trigger the...
	Earth Science: Peering into the Mouth of a Volcano FEMLAB GmbH, Zürich, Switzerland A group of scientists from three institutions are researching how to use information about electromagnetic fields in volcanoes to investigate and observe their activity and ultimately predict volcanic crises. Powerful simulations gives them deeper insights into volcanic processes and moves them a...
	Environment: Contamination of Groundwater-Fed Springs in Uganda Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden Dr. Roger Thunvik and Robinah Kulabako of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm use COMSOL Multiphysics to define just how the water contamination evolves in the densely populated lowlands fringing Kampala, so they can stamp out the problems with low cost remediation schemes.
	Environment: Argonne Models Alternate Hydrogen-production Technique Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL The "hydrogen economy" aims to reduce the USA´s reliance on imported fossil fuels along with the emission of greenhouse gases. Funding for alternative cycles is limited, so modeling identifies designs that are likely to be successful. Using computational simulation, Argonne was able to quickly...
	Safety: Fighting Fires Without Water UTRC, East Hartford, CT & Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden UTRC brings their vast experience to bear on designing ways to snuff out fires with inert gas. For their work, a single COMSOL file contains a number of different physics models which they connect and control with ODEs. The physics account for the gas discharge, the room pressures, chemical...
	Packaging: Taking a Bearing on Quality ASM Assembly Automation Ltd of Hong Kong Porous air bearings are a critical element of high-precision machinery thanks to their essentially frictionless operation, high speed, and accuracy. Thanks to their use of multiphysics modeling, engineers at ASM essentially eliminated the need for more than one prototype of a new bearing design...
	Civil Engineering: Fine Tuning for Water Purification Amsterdam Water Supply (AWS), Amsterdam, Netherlands Amsterdam Water Supply AWS of the Netherlands produces some of the cleanest drinking water in the world, almost 100 million cubic meters per year in fact. They take the water from the Rhine River and purify it in a 14-step process. COMSOL Multiphysics helps them fine tune what happens during this...
	Clean Energy: Modeling Optimizes Environmentally Friendly Flameless Furnace University of Catania, Italy In flameless combustion, air and fuel entering the chamber are mixed with high-temperature recirculated exhaust gases that provide the activation energy needed to initiate and maintain the reaction throughout the chamber. It is important that the fuel and air are injected in such a way that they...
	Optics: COMSOL simulates processors for fiber optics communication Enablence Technologies Inc., Ottawa, ON, Canada Required for simulating optical systems is the capacity to handle arbitrary geometries, individual and coupled processes, user-defined governing equations, vector equations, inhomogeneous and anisotropic material properties, complex numbers, freely prescribed boundary and initial conditions and...
	Microwave Engineering: Simulations Key to Non-Lethal Microwave Weapon SARA, Inc., Cyprus, CA SARA, Inc. is using COMSOL Multiphysics project to develop an antenna that supports directed transmissions of high-power microwaves (hpms). Such is used in a non-lethal weapon that blows out the defense, vehicle, and communications systems of a national enemies and fleeing criminals.
	High Frequency: The Last Frontier in the Electromagnetics Spectrum Rice University, Houston, TX The least-explored region of the electromagnetic spectrum consists of terahertz waves, which at 100 GHz to 10 THz fall between microwaves and infrared light. Only in recent years has the development of suitable waveguides for the technical maturation and widespread commercialization of T-ray...
	Electromagnetics: Modeling Metamaterials Leads to Major Breakthrough Duke University, Durham, NC In their efforts to use metamaterials to construct the world´s first working prototype of an invisibility cloak, researchers relied on modeling to lead them to the materials and designs that would make this sci-fi dream a reality. This work was acknowledged by _Science_ magazine as being among...
	Nanotechnology: Spinning Threads of the Tiniest Size Imaginable Chemical Engineering Department, The Lund Institute of Technology, Lund, Sweden The process of manufacturing nanowires-the smallest possible threads-is not wholly understood. Prof. Stig Stenström of Lund University in Sweden created a COMSOL Multiphysics model of nanowire growth to help researchers understand and better exploit the underlying phenomena.
	Aerospace Industry: Clearing the Air: Life Support for Space Exploration NASA Marshall Space Flight Center At the Life Support Systems Development Team, our task is to develop robust, life support systems for long duration space travel, such as lunar exploration missions or a trip to Mars. We are developing the next generation of atmosphere revitalization systems, which will reach for new levels of...
	Manufacturing: Reduced Metal Consumption in Electroplating Saves Big Money PEM, Siaugues, France Given the scarcity and price developments of today’s metals, virtually all of them can be counted as being ‘precious’. As a result, electroplating firms such as PEM always look for ways to reduce the amount of metals that are consumed as part of a process.
	Electrolysis: Electrochemical Machining in Appliance Manufacturing Royal Philips Electronics NV, Drachten, Netherlands Behind your clean, close shave there is an enormous amount of high technology, even in electric shavers that have been around for decades. On its next-generation shavers, Philips is starting to use multiphysics modeling to optimize the process used to manufacture the shaving cap that acts as a...
	Teaching: Always Check Your Results! University of Washington, Seattle, WA Partial differential equations form the theoretical basis for ready-to-use modeling packages in transport phenomena. Understanding the implementation and getting quick results move the PDEs from an abstract and theoretical level to a more concrete and practical level - _the equations come to life_.
	Mechanical Engineering: Micro-robots and airplanes with FEA Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden A self-propelled, remote-controlled micro-robot revolutionizes heart surgery via more effective 'peep hole operations' - and the same technology also leads to cheaper flights by reducing the air resistance around an aircraft in half. These widely differing applications may be the result of a...
	Electrochemical Engineering: Modeling Optimizes Fuel Cells Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA Automotive and other vehicular applications place their own special requirements on fuel cells. In designing a cell, many things comes into play: cell potential, the pressure of the gas in the anode and the cathode, relative humidity, and even the dimensions of key elements, among them the...
	Electrochemical Engineering: Modeling the Fuel Cell COMSOL AB and Catella Generics, Stockholm, Sweden In this rapidly developing and highly competitive market, the time from idea to prototype has shrunk. Therefore, tools for developing virtual prototypes have become exceptionally important. Optimizing a fuel cell´s performance in combination with its auxiliary equipment and operation of the...
	Space Exploration: Designing the Retina for an Eye Towards the Past SRON (Netherlands Institute for Space Research), Utrecht, Netherlands XEUS (The X-Ray Evolving Universe Spectrometer) is a mission being conducted by the European Space Agency with the goal of gaining a better view of the universe and the Big Bang. Time´s earliest black holes and galaxy clusters leave behind signatures in the form of X-rays that we can measure.
	Reactor Physics: Get Your Free Neutrons at ORNL! Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN "Free" neutrons are hardly free at all when it comes to money - actually, it takes enormously sophisticated equipment to create them, and only a handful of places on earth do it. Who needs free neutrons, anyway? Developers of advanced materials, new biotechniques, and cold fusion make just a few...
	Aerospace Industry: Airbus Evaluates Friction Stir Welding Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire, UK Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is an alternate way to joining metals, which also provides stronger welds. Dr. Paul Colegrove reports on the benefits of FSW, and the modeling of this new technology conducted by Airbus. A custom-designed user interface to an FEA model allows engineers to quickly...
	Acoustics: Sonar Listens to Material Properties NATO Undersea Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy With the help of multiphysics modeling, a group of researchers at the NATO Undersea Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy, are studying how to use low-frequency echoes to determine what an object is made of. Here, they are required to couple acoustics with the structural properties of such objects,...