Preview Top Highlights of COMSOL Multiphysics 6.4 Release

Just over 200 users of COMSOL Multiphysics software convened in Burlington, MA, a short Lyft ride away from Boston in October to hear the latest and greatest highlights of the upcoming release—COMSOL Multiphysics 6.4—which is set to be released within weeks.

The event, in the neighborhood of COMSOL’s U.S. headquarters, is a big draw for users in a range of sectors—acoustics simulation, aerospace, academia, medical, agriculture, electronics and more—who come to hear the latest enhancements and improvements in advance of the release drop. During the event, users from around the United States and worldwide can meet one-on-one with COMSOL representatives, get closeup looks at the software in action, choose from a variety of user-relevant minicourses and workshops, and glean knowledge while networking at keynote sessions and poster receptions.

Andrew Strikwerda, COMSOL application manager: Electromagnetics, kicked off an opening keynote on the release: “I’m very excited to present to you the news we have for COMSOL 6.4 release. From our first slide, you may be saying, ‘What’s the deal? You can simulate a cellphone now? That’s actually not that impressive.’ We can do all sorts of things already. We can simulate a touchscreen, we can simulate antennas, we can simulate batteries and can simulate the thermal management. What can’t you simulate?”

He continued: “There’s actually one very common evolution with a cellphone we’ve all experienced. It’s that we have dropped our cellphones.” He showed the impact analysis of the areas of the aluminum housing that would be damaged via a drop test. “You can look at the acceleration of all the internal components. You can track where the damage would appear in the cellphone screen and how those cracks would propagate as a result of the height you dropped this from.”

All these details lead up to a major highlight of the new release: “The technology that enables this is the structural dynamics explicit interface,” Strikwerda explains. “This is ideally suited for tracking high-speed events where there may be a lot of complicated interactions and nonlinear dynamics. This is perfect for applications such as drop tests, impact analysis, etc. This is a whole new area of functionality we can simulate with COMSOL.”

Bjorn Sjodin is likewise excited about this particular highlight of COMSOL’s upcoming release: “The new explicit dynamics for structural mechanics is huge,” Sjodin says. “You’d have to use very specialized focused software that has been around since the ‘80s for that before. But you could never do that type of analysis in a Multiphysics environment like COMSOL before.”

Though the technology is not new, what is new is that users now get it in the COMSOL environment.

“You can do more realistic structural simulations with it where things are bumping into each other, crashing and all that,” Sjodin adds. “That’s been difficult to do in the past in COMSOL, but now it’s possible.”

What makes this highlight even more powerful, according to Strikwerda, is how there are explicit and implicit structural dynamics, now addressed within COMSOL.

Consider the cellphone example again: It’s created in a factory and needs to be shipped. It’s put into plastic packaging, before being placed in a box. Dozens of these boxes are placed on a pallet. “Will the bottom cellphone withstand the fact that dozens and dozens of cellphones are being packed on top of it? This is ideally suited for implicit structural mechanics,” Strikwerda says.  “Maybe someone drops the top cellphone on the ground. Will it withstand that drop? That’s explicit dynamics. You can do that in the same interface, switching back and forth between these two approaches with just a couple of clicks to get the full structural analysis of how this device is going to operate.”

Over 200 users in aerospace, acoustics, agriculture, medical, electronics and various other sectors sat in on keynotes in Boston for the annual COMSOL conference. Image courtesy: COMSOL

Sjodin adds that there’s another valuable aspect of explicit dynamics, which was brought up by one of the attendees during the keynote. “You can use [explicit dynamics] for drop tests and things crashing into each other, but you can also use it to simulate very complicated contact scenarios.” He mentions crimping in the case of cables and wires. “Anything that wraps around something else—That is very difficult to solve with other technologies. But now with this technology you can solve very large deformation problems with complicated materials—nonlinear materials—for the first time.”

Also new for COMSOL 6.4 is the addition of a module: Granular Flow Module, specifically targeting those who work with grains with contact and friction. It uses the discrete element method.  This module, Strikwerda shares, could be used in specific industries including civil engineering applications with ore, coal or boulders; scenarios with pharmaceuticals where you’re putting pills into bottles; agriculture where beans are moved on a conveyor belt and into a silo. “You can analyze this in COMSOL, tracking contact forces, adhesion between balls and particles, and can track temperature of individual grains, etc.,” Strikwerda says.

General Updates

Another significant upgrade is specific to COMSOL’s GPU support for all physics. “If you have an NVIDIA GPU card, for example, you can now use this on any area of physics you’d like,” Strikwerda says. “We expect this to be generally applicable to a number of physics problems. In particular I think this will be advantageous for tightly coupled nonlinear problems.”

Adds Sjodin, “There’s no limit anymore on the type of physics this is supported for. The solver that we use that is making it GPU enabled is actually provided to us by NVIDIA. (NVIDIA developed this.) It’s only for NVIDIA as of now, but we anticipate we should be able to support other GPUs in the future.”

Sjodin shares how this GPU support carries over to COMSOL’s Application Builder capabilities.

“The nice thing with our apps is that all the functionality we add to the core functionality [such as GPU support] benefits apps as well. The way the apps work is that they’re built around the COMSOL Multiphysics framework. You can expand your apps with any new functionality,” he explains.

For example, the company has a COMSOL Compiler that allows users to compile an app to an executable, so then users can run the app without a COMSOL license for free. “You can send it to anyone—they don’t even need to know what COMSOL is,” Sjodin notes. “It will just run on their computer. They can package their simulation with a dedicated user interface that only shows the user the specific settings they need to work on. Everything else is hidden.”

Users would compile it to an executable file that can be run on another computer somewhere. That can now be GPU enabled. “So now if you have a graphics card on your computer the simulations can be even faster now with this GPU support. We think that’s really cool—compiled apps with GPU—that’s something we don’t know anyone else in the market that that can do right now.”

Other highlights include:

1. Performance improvements in software, such as support for cluster computations and load balancing. There are also enhancements in meshing, including a new boundary meshing algorithm called predominantly quadrilateral.
2. Quick preview.

“For those who import a lot of CAD files (government users, industry users), you have relatively complicated CAD files or PCB files. Previously you had to import the file, look at it and determine what you wanted to keep and what you didn’t want,” Strikwerda explains. “There’s now a quick preview option. You can very rapidly see what is in your CAD files/PCB and choose which assemblies or NETs you’d like to import and disregard the rest.”

1. Other physics areas: New general contact formulation, which reportedly “vastly simplifies” contact problems in structural mechanics.
2. For battery modeling, there are now arbitrary load cycles users can enter.
3. For electrodynamics, there is new support for transient conduction conditions, specifically in metallic boundaries.
4. Enhancements in electromagnetics. For those in high-frequency domains, the calculation of far-field, where you have a substrate and superstrate, is now built into the software.
5. Fluid flow enhancements include more accurate turbulence.
6. Acoustics updates.  According to COMSOL, customers had been asking about imported CFD data for aeroacoustics. “That’s now possible. You can import CGNS data files. There’s an import fluid flow interface that will take the data and make it easily accessible,” Strikwerda says.

During lively poster sessions, attendees could network and glean more insights from poster presenters about how they use COMSOL software. Image courtesy: COMSOL

Updated Functionality

Though chatbots in the Application Builder were introduced in a previous version, 6.4 elevates their use.

“In COMSOL 6.4, we are going to support the OpenAI API for chatbots,” Strikwerda shares. “This is the most commonly used chatbot API. So if you happen to have your own chatbot that you train, as long as it handles the OpenAI API, you can couple that in with COMSOL Multiphysics. You can run your own localized chatbot that doesn’t talk with anyone externally.”

In addition, he says it’s now possible and easy to attach your entire model to a question with the chatbot.

“We’ve also added technology so the chatbot will be fed COMSOL documentation, so it will preferentially reference official COMSOL documentation when constructing answers for you,” he continues. “Not only can you attach models to prompts, but you can also attach your own methods and images.”

Also, now within the Application Builder, it’s now easier to structure large apps. There is data access to geometry and mesh.

Real-world Examples of App Users

Volkswagen Kassel uses COMSOL Multiphysics to accelerate the design process for electric motors. They use simulation apps to track stress in rotor laminations. Design engineers input operating conditions: current temperatures, motor speed, and loading of motor. The app will generate information about stress conditions.

“One of the key aspects here is they’re [design engineers are] able to do this without being simulation experts. We don’t need to provide additional training on numerical methods, on simulation tools to these engineers. They can simply use the app as instructed and get the high-fidelity simulation results they need to continue with their work,” Strikwerda shares.

At Samsung Audio in LA: transducer engineers run day-to-day calculations. Samsung has used COMSOL Multiphysics to create simulation apps for their transducer engineers.

“We’ve all seen the TVs that have gotten thinner and thinner with every passing year. This makes it more complicated to actually construct and make a speaker that will work in these operating conditions. [Samsung] has constructed apps that allow transducer engineers to test their configurations and ensure the sound going out in the room is relatively homogenous throughout the viewing area,” Strikwerda shares.

In another example, Empa uses COMSOL Multiphysics to help farmers determine freshness of produce in cold storage. They’re essentially making simulation apps alongside digital twins. “They constructed a cellphone apps that they distributed to farmers and operators of cold rooms in Nigeria and India. Users of this app type in real-world data concerning their produce. That information is then fed to a COMSOL app that is running on a headless node. App … takes data from actual measurements on site, runs computations, then provides predictions about freshness of produce on site,” Strikwerda shares.

Future of Simulation

Where exactly is the simulation software industry headed? Sjodin has some thoughts. “One big thing we are pushing is simulation apps. Simulation now is limited to expert users. But when our expert users create simulation apps, we hear stories about the apps being used by farmers, by sales people. To be able to do a simulation live in front of a customer without involving an expert is fantastic. That’s one way simulation is headed toward more democratization through more apps.

“GPU acceleration is a big deal as well. It will cut simulation times down to half or less,” Sjodin continues. “I’d also mention use of surrogate models —sometimes called AI reduced order models. We don’t think it’s AI really—they’re not very smart; they’re just good at reproducing the model in a faster way. The surrogate model can take the physics model and compress it on to something very small that is very fast to evaluate. You can train one of those surrogate models on all parameters beforehand and then when you give it to the sales guy showing the prospect, you can get an instantaneous answer. You precompile the answer, using surrogate models. You basically use AI and machine learning. By using machine learning, you not only can use apps but can make the apps faster and add GPU on top of that. It leads to everything becoming more efficient and faster. All of that will make simulations more accessible to more people.”