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

A fluid can for instance be set in motion by changing its temperature. We have a pretty neat example of a glass filled with cold water that is placed on a heat source (as seen below). The heat is increasing the fluid’s velocity, thus causing it to move. This particular example is very simple, but the main concept can be applied to more complex situations such as industrial machinery or electronic devices, to name a couple.

(Check out an animated version of this example here).

The upcoming webinar on Thursday, February 9th at 2pm EST will explore how COMSOL can be used to simulate flow as well as how that flow can be linked to other processes. Topics to be discussed include multiphase and singular flow, laminar and turbulent flow, forced and natural convection, fluid-solid interaction and more. There will also be a worked example of how to set up and solve a convection-dominated coupled-physics problem with COMSOL Multiphysics. Get excited.

Go here for more information on the Multiphysics Flow Simulations webinar and to sign up now.

How disappointed I was when I typed ‘FEM vs FVM’ into Google and saw that there wasn’t much to sink your teeth into. My blog post ranked pretty highly, which explains how little this has been debated.

While there were a couple of decent presentations summarizing both methods, I was beginning to feel that the Discussion Forum thread was the most comprehensive summary I was going to get on the subject.

Yet, there was one nugget I found on Youtube (a picture is worth a thousand words, as you can see below). A 3-second video shows FEM being able to handle the retrograde oscillatory flow (apparently pretty common in biomechanics) in the figure on the right, while FVM’s correction method either ignores or rubs out this effect. And in the abstract connected to this research, the author concludes “the computation time required for convergence was found to be significantly smaller for the finite element approach” (you can find the abstract here). Get your teeth into that!! I’ll keep looking at this subject for sure.

Here’s the 3-second video I found on YouTube:

He has written it for the professional engineer or to be used in senior level college courses. It covers a wide range of models from 1D to 3D and introduces the readers to the finite element method. If you would like to get your hands on a copy, the book can be ordered from www.merclearning.com/multiphysics_modeling_comsol.

Creating visual representations of simulation results during postprocessing often involves combining data from various parameters into a single model. In order to effectively present your results with isosurfaces, particle tracing, videos, or color plots, you need a graphics card that is up to the challenge. AMD FirePro graphics cards are just that.

For a list of supported cards visit our system requirements page.

Learn more about the certification.
Find out more on COMSOL partnerships.

Basically (and with many caveats), FEM provides more degrees of freedom and therefore accuracy; but is more memory-intensive. Yet, with the advances of computing power these days, this isn’t much of a problem and FEM is being used more and more, even in CFD. FEM is far more suited to multiphysics modeling.

All three of the Discussion Forum’s Moderators were involved and it was a great comparative effort from the “Fluid Guy’s” and the “Structural Guy’s” point of view. The “Electrical Guy” suggested the question go to support, as they may produce an interesting answer too – but I think that this discussion’s interest level could not be topped.

Check it out and join the discussion.

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.

Senior John Schmidt matched his experimental results on a perfectly functional cantilever beam with both an analytical model and one performed in COMSOL Multiphysics. He now hopes to match results from a damaged beam with that from a COMSOL model. (Find the article from Gustavus Adolphus College here)

This got me thinking. If a finite-element model gives the same results as both an analytical model and experiment, then I suppose you can trust the finite-element model for other dimensions of a similar cantilever beam. Yet, if it then gives the same results as the experimental results from a damaged cantilever beam, can we trust the finite-element model to simulate other damaged cantilever beams? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts, feel free to leave your comments and ideas on our Facebook page.

I decided to talk to my marketing colleague, Lauren Sansone, to see if she had any additional insight on this. She then proceeded to tell me all about the new training series we’re running for 2012. “We are doubling the number of sessions offered in Burlington, MA,” she said, “and we have stepped up the number of application specific courses that we are offering.” For instance, the suite of courses offered now includes corrosion and electrodeposition. Furthermore, our certified partner, AltaSim, are conducting 4-day bootcamp sessions on COMSOL this season. There are apparently some fun new courses to be added in May as well, so look out for that.

Watch out for a hardcopy of the Winter and Spring 2012 Training Series brochure coming your way in the mail soon.
A PDF version is also available for immediate download on our website.

It comes as no surprise. Here’s a wealth of know-how directly from users of COMSOL.  Fresh content, and lots of it, from modeling and simulation experts around the world who are there with you 24/7. How can anyone resist that?

See what your colleagues are talking about right now in the COMSOL Community.