Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Puts COMSOL to the Test
Professor Joel L. Plawsky, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Joel L. Plawsky is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and author of the textbook, “Transport Phenomena Fundamentals”.
As a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and author of the textbook, Transport Phenomena Fundamentals, Joel L. Plawsky has been using COMSOL Multiphysics for more than five years. “As a research tool, COMSOL has simplified our lives quite a bit. Instead of having to write code and laboriously work to visualize the solutions, we are now able to be much more efficient and productive. COMSOL enables us to spend less time solving the problem and more time understanding the underlying physical phenomena and analyzing the results,” he said.
Professor Plawsky’s research team recently has been investigating gate and interconnect dielectric reliability as a function of operating temperature and the electric field applied to the structure. They are interested in how metal ions injected into the dielectric affect the time required for the devices to fail. COMSOL was used to simulate a dielectric breakdown in a transistor that led his team to uncover some new physics about how that process works. Professor Plawsky added, “Using COMSOL, we’ve done things at Rensselaer such as simulating a whole piece of pilot scale equipment that we built to make coated aerogel superinsulation for NASA. We’ve also simulated temperature profiles in the active region of LEDs, the performance of wickless micro heat pipes, and the flow around an Aerobee flying ring.”
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This figure shows the pressure distribution and flow streamlines about an aerobee flying ring at the point where the forward stagnation point is very near the lower tip of the aerobee. The tremendous lift generated contributes to the long distance flying ability of the ring. |
According to Professor Plawsky, modeling and simulation software is an essential part of the modern-day engineer’s toolkit, which is why integrating software into the curriculum at Rensselaer is a priority. He first began using COMSOL as a teaching tool for transport phenomena: “There are many finite element packages out there and many packages that do one or the other of the transport processes chemical engineers need; however, it turns out that for transport processes and especially for coupled transport processes, COMSOL is the best program available.”
Currently, COMSOL is used in the undergraduate and graduate transport processes sequence as well as in the graduate math methods course at Rensselaer. COMSOL is something that chemical engineers can jump right into and readily use. The equations and the jargon that the program uses are nearly identical to how we teach the discipline in our courses. So the software becomes a natural extension of what we do in the classroom and something students will want to use,” said Plawsky.
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This figure shows a contour plot of the electric field generated by copper ion diffusion in a porous low dielectric constant material. Failure occurs when the electric field crosses a threshold value shown by the maximum point on the figure. This point occurs very near the classical boundary separation point in flow over a cylinder. |
As for the text used in the classroom, a second edition of Professor Plawsky’s book (published by Taylor & Francis) is due out for the 2009/2010 academic year and will make extensive use of COMSOL as a teaching tool. “COMSOL gets integrated with the book from the very beginning as both examples and homework problems. Some of the introductory concepts in the book are some of the easiest things to simulate in COMSOL, so students who are unfamiliar with the program can start out working some modules early on,” he said. “Using the textbook, students can get a feel for how the program works, and then as we build up in complexity in the textbook, we begin to build up in complexity with COMSOL by introducing new features and new phenomena.”