During his life, John Scott Russell chased his passion for science — literally. While watching horses pull a boat through a shallow canal, he noticed a wave behaving strangely and followed it for one or two miles on horseback. For the rest of his life, he continued to chase this wave (which he called the “wave of translation”) figuratively, persevering even when his theories were ridiculed by scientists. Did Scott Russell ever catch up to his wave?

The Ray Optics Module extends the modeling capabilities of the COMSOL Multiphysics® software to include ray tracing simulation. This module makes it possible to accomplish advanced thermal, structural, and other studies of complex optical systems in an integrated software environment. The first step in a successful simulation is the creation of the model geometry. This blog post examines how to create a complex lens geometry, using the Petzval lens as an example.

Many antennas deployed in basic communications systems are linearly polarized, meaning that for the orientation of the electric field, polarization is confined to a single plane. Antennas that present the option of circular polarization give you more to work with, because the polarization of the wave varies while it propagates. Helical antennas, for instance, are able to generate circularly polarized waves in the axial operating mode. RF simulation can be used to optimize helical antenna designs.

Picture a classroom filled with students. At the front, a teacher discusses room acoustics, including the underlying theories and acoustics phenomena involved. To help students visualize these concepts, the teacher has created a simulation app. This app, which is accessible through a web browser, enables students to dynamically alter parameters and see the results, creating a vivid learning experience. At the Technical University of Munich (TUM), several such apps are already being used, providing benefits to teachers and students alike…

Wastewater often contains organic and inorganic materials, which can be nonbiodegradable and even toxic. To reuse wastewater, these contaminants are removed via physical, chemical, and biological processes. Clarifiers treat wastewater by separating the particles via sedimentation, but their performance is affected by factors such as settling, turbulence, the ratio of the particles’ outer surfaces to mass, sudden direction changes in the flow, and the velocity profile. To design clarifiers for effective wastewater treatment, engineers can turn to fluid flow simulation.

The lid-driven cavity is a popular problem within the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for validating computational methods. While the boundary conditions are relatively simple, the flow features created are quite interesting and complex. Here, we demonstrate how to define this benchmark problem in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software. We also showcase techniques like mapped meshing and nonlinearity ramping, which can be applied to a wide variety of CFD models.

Born to a family with a longstanding military lineage, it’s no surprise that Jean-Charles de Borda joined the French army and navy. He was a man of many trades and is also seen as a surveyor, mathematician, political scientist, and physicist. Due to his wide interests, Borda contributed to the advancement of fluid mechanics, geodesy, navigation, and more during his lifetime.

Known as the “father of information theory”, Claude Shannon shaped the way we think about computer operations and communications between devices as a single framework. His groundbreaking ideas about testing digital circuits, coding messages in binary, and programming artificial intelligence ushered us into the digital age. The internet was made possible by Shannon’s classical foundations in information science, and thanks to his equations, the amount of data we’re able to store and share consistently increases.

The average human heart beats around 100,000 times in a single day. With each beat, the four valves within the heart open and close, transporting blood unidirectionally through its chambers. By simulating heart valves, medical researchers can study their behavior to address various cardiac health issues. As an example, a team from Veryst Engineering modeled a heart valve opening and closing with the COMSOL Multiphysics® software.

Attitude detection, the measurement of an object’s orientation and rotation in three-dimensional space, is a crucial element in aircraft and spacecraft navigation. Recently, ring laser gyroscopes and fiber ring gyroscopes have proven to be viable alternatives to traditional mechanical gyros for accurately measuring rotations. The fundamental operating principle of such devices is an optical phenomenon called the Sagnac effect. In this blog post, we’ll employ ray optics simulation to observe this effect in a basic Sagnac interferometer.