CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
10 October 2008
Product News
COMSOL Multiphysics® 3.5 Advances Simulation Efficiency and Productivity through High-Performance CAD and ECAD Interoperability
COMSOL, Inc. announced COMSOL Multiphysics® 3.5, an upgrade of its engineering and scientific software environment for modeling and simulating any physics-based system. Expanding and facilitating COMSOL’s interoperability with third-party CAD/CAM/CAE applications, version 3.5 provides new Parasolid® file format support and a new bidirectional Autodesk Inventor® interface. New solvers, coding, and usability enhancements, as well as a wealth of new functionalities, application modes, and material models and properties in COMSOL’s suite of discipline-specific modules boost efficiency and productivity to new levels. COMSOL will demonstrate version 3.5 for the first time today and through October 11 at the 2008 COMSOL Conference in Boston.
Version 3.5 – Most Efficient COMSOL Ever
Raised efficiency, increased performance, and reduced memory requirements throughout COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5 is achieved by the implementation of new solvers and revised implementation of the existing ones. Benchmark tests show that version 3.5 is more than 3 times faster for large flow models when compared to version 3.4.
Solving is substantially faster for time-dependent structural mechanics, electromagnetic, acoustics, and fluid-flow simulations using a new solver. You can also cut memory usage by as much as 50 percent for common dynamic multiphysics simulations, such as Joule heating, with the new time-dependent segregated solver. This solver also offers new flexible settings that make setting up problems with various multiphysics couplings easier and faster.
Two to eight times faster time-domain wave simulations and fluid flow simulations are now achieved through solver enhancements. Larger problems can be run using the new out-of-core solver, which utilizes disk memory for efficiently storing intermediate results on 32-bit and 64-bit computers. Optimized code has boosted shared-memory parallelism speedup by 20%.
Parasolid Powers CAD Import Module
Interoperability with third-party engineering and scientific applications is greatly enhanced in version 3.5 by supporting the Parasolid file format from Siemens PLM Software throughout the CAD import process. Additionally, the CAD Import Module is now also available on the Macintosh.
Parasolid improves file import efficiency by eliminating the conversion of objects to COMSOL geometry. It enhances productivity by giving you the ability to repair or defeature individual parts in an assembly easily and quickly. Parasolid support saves substantial time when meshing by enabling you to mesh on the Parasolid geometry directly.
New Bidirectional Interface for Inventor and Parametric Sweeps
The new, easy-to-use Autodesk Inventor bidirectional interface, which works like its SolidWorks® counterpart, maintains two-way associativity between Inventor and COMSOL so that any changes made in a COMSOL or Autodesk Inventor session propagate across both solutions automatically. The Inventor and SolidWorks bidirectional interfaces, when used with the CAD Import Module, now support geometric parametric sweeps to automatically compute solutions for different geometric shapes. This new functionality lets you wrap any parametric sweeps around any solver, including time-dependent, stationary, or eigenvalue solvers. Parametric sweeps can be run on distributed-memory systems such as Linux and Windows Compute clusters.
“We know that minimizing the time and effort spent on CAD import and repair is important to our users,” says Ed Fontes, Vice President of Applications at COMSOL. “With COMSOL 3.5 CAD Import Module we’re leveraging Parasolid geometry representation for import, repair, and meshing throughout, accelerating the geometry preprocessing. In addition, the improved SolidWorks bidirectional interface and the new Autodesk Inventor bidirectional interface enhance the efficiency of CAD import and introduce the ability to run geometric parameter sweeps in COMSOL to our existing users.”
New Meshing Flexibilities
COMSOL’s meshing capabilities are extended with new, flexible features, such as creating tetrahedral elements from an existing mesh of hexahedral elements. You can create high-quality meshes for 2D and 3D surfaces using the new advancing-front mesher, which is now the default mesher for 2D geometries. Version 3.5 also marks the debut of a swept meshing functionality that makes meshing layered structures simpler, faster, and easier.
More Versatile Postprocessing
Enhancements in version 3.5 make postprocessing, visualizations, and result communication more versatile and productive. COMSOL graphics now support the highly portable and sharable GIF and animated GIF formats. You can customize color maps and create personalized color scales. The new Plot While Solving function lets you monitor solutions in progress, giving you the option to update settings and restart a solution early if needed. You can now perform sensitivity analysis.
Updated Discipline-Specific Modules
New features, application modes, and material properties abound throughout version 3.5 of the COMSOL Multiphysics suite of discipline-specific modules. Here’s a quick tour of the most significant changes by module.
AC/DC Module
AC/DC Module 3.5 offers a new ECAD interface for creating geometries of printed circuit board (PCB) designs imported from ODB++ files and GDS files. You can now use NETEX-G® from Artwork Conversion Software to create geometries from Gerber/drill file formats. Nonlinear transient AC/DC simulations run faster by enhanced control of the nonlinear solver.
Chemical Engineering Module
Chemical Engineering Module 3.5 features new Two-Phase Flow application modes that lets you model interfaces between immiscible fluids that include such multiphysics effects as the impact of charge separation. You can combine the level set-based and phase field-based application analysis types for two-phase flow with the new surface tension data included in the Liquids and Gases material properties library. New stabilization techniques, new solvers, and default setting refinements enhance the efficiency of all solvers for fluid flow applications substantially.
Earth Science Module
The Earth Science Module 3.5 enables you to simulate the effects of porous media flow on stresses and strains using a new predefined multiphysics coupling for poroelasticity. The module also includes a Liquids and Gases material properties library.
Heat Transfer Module
The Heat Transfer Module 3.5 greatly speeds up nonisothermal flow and convective heat transfer simulations as well as provides better stabilization for modeling free convection and heat transfer in turbulent flows. Simulations of heat and flow in electronic cooling, free convection, and general thermal management applications are now up to 8 times faster, while memory requirements for thermal stresses are down 25 percent. In heat conduction applications, new functionality lets you run simulations of unbounded domains through the infinite elements technique.
MEMS Module
The MEMS Module 3.5 features new two-phase flow application modes tuned for multiphysics couplings, which are enhanced with new surface tension data from the Liquids and Gases material properties library. Electro-thermomechanical simulations are now easy to set up with the new predefined multiphysics coupling. Piezo-electric devices and MEMS in general can be integrated in SPICE circuit simulations. You can also include structural damping, dielectric, and coupling losses in the enhanced piezoelectric simulation environment. Viscoelastic material models and large deformations are also incorporated into this release. The new ECAD import greatly facilitates the generation of 3D geometries from mask layouts.
RF Module
The RF Module 3.5 introduces new circuit ports for simulating the connection of a transmission line or an antenna and an external circuit. Adaptive meshing gives a higher accuracy of extracted S-parameters, which can be used for accurate system modeling. ECAD import shortens the path from circuit board layout to 3D geometry. Time domain simulations are up to 4 times faster using the new time-dependent solver.
Structural Mechanics Module
Version 3.5 extends the usability of the Structural Mechanics Module with a new interface for viscoelastic material models. For nonlinear acoustoelasticity, you can use the hyperelastic Murgnaghan material model. Electro-thermomechanical simulations are now easy to set up using the new predefined multiphysics coupling. The piezoelectric simulation environment is substantially enhanced with a new dialog box for introducing structural damping, dielectric, and coupling losses. Also, large deformations for piezoelectric devices are now included. Overall modeling efficiency is substantially enhanced, for time-dependent simulations especially, using new solvers and fine-tuned default settings.
COMSOL Script, Optimization Lab, and Reaction Engineering Lab
COMSOL Script now offers MPI support for distributed memory systems, allowing you to run processes that are independent of each other on different computers in a cluster. Stationary multiphysics optimization problems, such as inverse modeling, are easier to set up using a new simulation environment and faster to solve with analytic gradients.
COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab presents a new CAPE-OPEN interface for thermodynamic and physical properties. With this interface, you can link the Reaction Engineering Lab and the Chemical Engineering Module with database software that computes the thermodynamic and physical properties of liquids and gases.
“COMSOL’s implementation of CAPE-OPEN interfaces lets any COMSOL model access thermodynamic servers from third parties through the CAPE-OPEN standardized methods,” comments Michel Pons, Chief Technology Officer at CAPE-OPEN Laboratories Network (CO-LaN). “CAPE-OPEN will provide COMSOL users with thermodynamic consistency throughout their modeling workflow as well as access to state-of-the-art technology in the thermodynamic area. COMSOL’s decision clearly expands process modeling capability, and CO-LaN is strongly supportive of such initiatives.”
Availability
COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5 runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh workstations and is available directly from COMSOL and its global network of distributors immediately. Pricing starts at $8,995 (U.S.).
For details about COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5, all discipline-specific technology modules, and detailed system requirements, or to sign up for an introductory CD, visit COMSOL, Inc. at httwww.comsol.com.
About the COMSOL product line
COMSOL Multiphysics is a software environment that provides scientists, engineers, and researchers with integrated technology for modeling, simulating, and discovering any system with both single or multiple physics phenomena. A broad range of discipline-specific modules extends the COMSOL environment for chemical engineering, earth science, electromagnetics, heat transfer, MEMS, and structural mechanics applications. COMSOL also offers the COMSOL Reaction Engineering Lab®, which allows users to model reacting systems, and COMSOL Script®, which provides a textual-based interface to COMSOL Multiphysics models. COMSOL products are available for the Windows, Linux, Solaris, and the Macintosh operating systems. Full details about COMSOL Multiphysics and related products are available at http://www.comsol.com .
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