COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5 Advances CAD & ECAD Interoperability

By DE Editors

A simulation of the thermo-electro-magneto-mechanical effects in an RF Coil visualizes the magnetic flux lines, thermally induced stress, and deformation.

COMSOL, Inc. (Burlington, MA) announced COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5, an upgrade of its engineering and scientific software environment for modeling and simulating any physics-based system.

Expanding 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. Plus, the CAD Import Module is now available on the Macintosh.

New solvers, coding, and usability enhancements, as well as new functionalities,  application modes, and material models and properties in COMSOL’s suite of discipline-specific modules are said to boost efficiency and scientific productivity to new levels.

Benchmark tests show that version 3.5 is more than 3x faster for large flow models when compared to version 3.4. and solving is substantially faster for time-dependent structural mechanics, electromagnetic, acoustics, and fluid-flow simulations using a new solver.

Solver enhancements enable 2x to 8x faster time-domain wave simulations and fluid flow simulations. Larger problems can be run using the new out-of-core solver, which uses disk memory for storing intermediate results on 32- and 64-bit computers. Optimized code has boosted shared-memory parallelism speedup by 20 percent, the company says.

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. Plus, COMSOL’s meshing capabilities are extended with new, flexible features, such as creating tetrahedral elements from an existing mesh of hexahedral elements. The suite of updated discipline-specific modules include AC/DC Module 3.5, Chemical Engineering Module 3.5, Earth Science Module 3.5, Heat Transfer Module 3.5, MEMS Module 3.5, RF Module 3.5, and Structural Mechanics Module.

COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5 runs on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh workstations;  pricing starts at $8,995.

For details about COMSOL Multiphysics 3.5, or to sign up for an introductory CD, visit COMSOL, Inc.

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.