A detailed abstract is required for both oral and poster presentations. Find guidelines on what you need to include in your abstract here.

You have the option to submit a full-length paper regardless of whether you choose to present your work orally or with a poster. The full-length paper is due on September 1^st.

We look forward to receiving your abstract within the next month!

• CFD
• Corrosion
• Introduction to COMSOL Multiphysics
• MEMS
• Meshing
• RF & Microwaves
• Structural Mechanics Modeling

(For a full list and topic descriptions, please go to our conference minicourse page).

We are also happy to announce our two Gold sponsors for this year’s multiphysics event: AltaSim Technologies and SpaceClaim. You are invited to read more about them, and how to become a sponsor, on our conference sponsor page.

We are giving engineers and scientists like you an opportunity to present your work of art. The brand new 2012 Conference webpage is up and running and we are already accepting abstract submissions. 20 Program Committee members have been selected for this year’s big event with the task of reviewing your abstracts. We are happy to have leaders in the user community serving as members of the committee. Their service contributes greatly to the success of our conference.

This year we have the pleasure of having the following members inducted into the Program Committee:
- Derek Bassett, Tokyo Electron America
- Sushil Bharatan, Analog Devices
- Rajeswari Chandrasekaran, Ford Motor Company
- R. Daniel Costley, U.S. Army Engineer Research & Development Center
- Ben Flugstad, BioGeoWave Technologies
- David M. Follansbee, New York State Department of Health
- Fábio Rosas Gutterres, Petrobras R&D Center
- David Hopkins, Army Research Laboratory
- Andrew Kettner, Atomic Energy Canada Limited
- Tanai Marin, Vale Canada Limited
- Tapan Mukerji , Stanford University
- Claudio G. Parazzoli, The Boeing Company
- Andreas Putz, Automotive Fuel Cell Cooperation
- Marty Shipley, Avago Technologies U.S.
- Andy Tsai, Harvard Medical School
- Minh Vuong, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.
- Yaroslav Urzhumov, Duke University
- Jeffrey Wilson, NASA Glenn Research Center
- Wahiba Yaici, Natural Resources Canada
- Ozgur Yildirim, Intellectual Ventures

Check back often for more Conference details!

At the time I was working on a two-phase non-isothermal flow simulation and I was lost in my train of thought… “How to correctly represent volume forces? Is it ok to use the Boussinesq approximation? Is this mesh fine enough? Am I using the right material properties?” I bet you know what I mean. If you’re into modeling and are using the right tool, you can’t really say you’re working: you’re just having fun.

You can easily forget about a meeting or an important phone call; when your simulation is converging you get your reward and can run around the office screaming “Eureka”. Such a feeling reminds me of why I accepted to serve as program chair once again and without any hesitation, for our conference. It’s amazing to go through all the abstracts, discuss them with the scientific committee members during the review process and listen to the authors presenting their work just a few weeks later.

I continue to be amazed at how users do magic with COMSOL, even though I see it happen all the time. I like how we thank each speaker with a big applause after the user presentations. We really appreciate the effort in explaining to the audience, in just fifteen minutes, the research and design challenges faced and how they have been overcome. Then I take a stroll around the posters and I get new insights into current R&D work, each one of them a feast for the eyes (thanks to COMSOL post-processing) and a challenge for the mind.

We contribute to make our world a better place whether we are designing a fancy product or a life-saving device: this is something that all of us should be proud of. I can meet researchers and engineers from all over the world that choose to be part of this very special, hands-on event to share ideas, learn about new technology, and connect with colleagues.

I digress… We now have the new conference site up and running and we’ll soon add the Program Committee page. For the Milan Program Committee, I can anticipate that members belong to well-known companies and universities such as Barilla, Olivetti, Hitachi, and École Polytechnique, to name a few. Most of the members will attend the conference and chair the user presentation sessions, so don’t miss the chance to meet them! The call for papers section is entirely dedicated to authors. The first deadline to submit an abstract for the Milan conference is June 22 (a reduced registration rate is applied to early birds). Abstracts can be up to 500 words long and contain 4 figures. Contact me at valerio.marra@comsol.com if you need further information or join the forum where we’ll soon start to discuss guidelines, topic areas, user presentations, posters, panel discussions, keynotes, minicourses, and the like. I hope you’ll join the multiphysics community and help us in making a great conference!

As for the project that initially distracted me: aren’t you curious about which application I’m working on? For the moment I can only tell you that I have yet to reap my reward as I’m still trying to figuring out which the best operating conditions are that I need in order to obtain the result I want. It’s a very famous decorative item, I’ll share the results with you soon, so stay tuned!

So what happens after you submit your abstract? –Our scientific program committee reviews all abstracts and gives their approval notices by August 10th for Boston, August 17th for Milan, and September 9th for Bangalore presenters, respectively. In Boston, my colleague Jinlan Huang has so far inducted over 20 people from some well-established organizations to be on our program committee, including The Boeing Company, NASA Glenn Research Center, Duke University, Ford, to name a few. (Stay tuned to find out who’s on our committees in Milan and Bangalore).

As I mentioned, you can submit an abstract for either a poster or a paper. The way these two media are presented differs. For example, if you want to do an oral presentation on a paper, these presentations are held as parallel sessions divided into topic areas open to all conference attendees. Posters on the other hand are typically displayed in a larger area of the venue, such as the main ballroom at the Boston location, to allow attendees to browse all posters at once.

Did you know that if you present a poster or a paper at one of our conferences you will also get the chance to publish your work on the ever-popular Conference CD? Getting your work on the CD means reaching the eyes of 100,000+ people around the world. Imagine that. (If you want to view papers and posters from last year, you can get a copy of the Conference CD for free here.)

Those who decide to submit an abstract by the Early Bird submission date receive a reduced conference registration fee. ($195 in Boston and €195 in Milan).

For suggested topic areas, all important dates, and to submit your abstract, visit the conference page for your location:

• Boston, USA
• Milan, Italy
• Bangalore, India

Actually, the solar thermal collector model was inspired by a customer case story (get the PDF version of the article here). ENEL from Italy had just built the first Concentrating Solar Power plant that uses molten salt to store and transfer the heat, rather than pressurized oil. The outer wall of the tube is used to transfer heat, through radiation, to the inner wall that contains the flowing, molten salt.

By using a molten salt, you can heat the fluid to a higher temperature and therefore increase efficiency when this heat is converted to electricity in a steam turbine. Read the full story here.

We’ve noticed that although the User Presentations are interesting, there’s very little time to ask the presenters questions before the next one has to get up there to present. On the other hand, we have all appreciated the Keynote presentations, which are often more general in their content, but also don’t provide much opportunity to ask questions.

Some of the most rewarding parts of the conference, for me, have been the dinners and poster sessions where longer conversations can be held with a number of people. I’ve also noticed that a lot of people are talking about specific topics like; what’s the future for the MEMS industry, or how much flexibility should we expect with a simulating software?

So, now we hope to get about five or so parallel sessions going, during one of the afternoons of the conference, where the focus will be on getting people to discuss what they love most: modeling!

Invited speakers will give a general talk to start off the discussion, and then they will join a couple of their colleagues and an engineer from COMSOL on the panel to discuss the subject together with the audience.

We have yet to decide the topics, so any suggestions are welcome. (Feel free to post your ideas to our Facebook page!)

So what’s causing such a stir?

Just late last week my colleagues in the marketing department finally locked in event dates for the COMSOL Conference 2012 (dates for each location listed below). Perhaps I’m biased, but I absolutely love this event. The preparations, the actual occasion, and the aftermath make me giddy. This year’s conference program is almost finalized, and I hear there are going to be a couple of neat changes this time around, so look out for details on that. During the event I love looking at all the posters and it’s a tricky business choosing which user presentations to attend. The caliber of the projects that everyone has been working on never ceases to astound me, and I know our committee tends to have a tough time picking winners for the best paper and poster awards. I wonder what fascinating work will be presented this year?

If you would like to stay up-to-date on new details about the conference as they are made available or if you are thinking about presenting at any of the events, submit your notice of interest here:

COMSOL Conference Boston 2012, October 3-5

COMSOL Conference Milan 2012, October 10-12

COMSOL Conference Bangalore 2012, November 2-3

Vineet Dravid, Managing Director of COMSOL India reports….

“The 3rd COMSOL Conference in Bangalore was an exciting event. It was kicked off by a keynote address by the VP of Product Management, Bjorn Sjodin, who introduced the Particle Tracing Module, the Physics Interface Builder and other new features of COMSOL version 4.2a. This was followed by Pranay Goel, IISER, who talked about the basis of insulin secretion in the pancreas, and then by R Venkatraghavan, Unilever R&D, who gave a broad overview of scientific research at Unilever in general, followed by a discussion on filtration related problems.

Several minicourses were held where attendees received insights into the nitty-gritty of COMSOL. There were several sessions of oral presentations that saw a healthy exchange of ideas among attendees.

The session which stood out in my view was the poster session. This was vibrant and packed with an infectious energy fuelled by impressive research mostly performed undergraduate students. Many of them went beyond the requirements set by their curriculum and presented extensive and interesting studies.

All of us at COMSOL India are looking forward to seeing everyone again next year!”
Thank you very much Vineet for some great reflections.

Phil

They coupled fluid flow, mass transport, biochemical reactions, biofilm dynamics, and sorption, where an ordinary differential equation was solved for sorption on the soil particle boundaries. They found that the microorganism degradation was the prime factor in shaping the breakthrough behavior of organic substances at the pore scale. Further, they found that the geometry of the pore space was greatly altered by biofilm growth, and thus a significant impact on the flow field.

Phil