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At the Life Support Systems Development Team, our task is to develop robust, life support systems for long duration space travel, such as lunar exploration missions or a trip to Mars. We are developing the next generation of atmosphere revitalization systems, which will reach for new levels of resource conservation via a high percentage of loop closure.
Scheduled to launch in the fall of 2009 with the goal of reaching Mars in October 2010, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic rover that will look for signs of habitable environments on the Red Planet. One of the instruments selected to fly aboard the MSL is the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument.
The results of fully coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction analyses have allowed ACES to resolve performance issues with new products prior to mass production, significantly reducing the time and cost of new product development and manufacture.
With the scaling down of semiconductor devices, current density in the metal interconnects joining individual transistors increases. Up to now, lifetime models have been based on empirical methods. Thus, an evaluation of potential failure modes is very important as STMicroelectronics brings new advanced technologies onto the market.
We used multiphysics modeling to model the mechanical and thermal behavior of our direct thermal printing process and to postprocess the data. The mechanical simulation investigated the compressive contact between the platen and the print medium as well as between the medium and print head.
Given the scarcity and price developments of today’s metals, virtually all of them can be counted as being ‘precious’. As a result, electroplating firms such as PEM always look for ways to reduce the amount of metals that are consumed as part of a process.
Mathematical modeling is going far beyond the R&D lab and is starting to make a real difference in manufacturing processes. Today it would be virtually impossible to adapt our process to each client’s requirements without COMSOL Multiphysics.
It is common to use data at room temperature in a simulation because elevated temperature data could not be found. However, the effects of temperature on a given material property can be quite large and ignoring the temperature effects can lead to erroneous and misleading simulation results.
Flexibility was required by the Saab Group who wanted to simulate the striking of airplane wings by lightning, as well as how much the shielding material around a power substation would heat up. This story shows how they could manipulate COMSOL Multiphysics and the underlying equations to do just this.
Behind your clean, close shave there is an enormous amount of high technology, even in electric shavers that have been around for decades. On its next-generation shavers, Philips is starting to use multiphysics modeling to optimize the process used to manufacture the shaving cap that acts as a shell around the rotating cutter.
Friction Stir Welding (FSW) is an alternate way to joining metals, which also provides stronger welds. Dr. Paul Colegrove reports on the benefits of FSW, and the modeling of this new technology conducted by Airbus. A custom-designed user interface to an FEA model allows engineers to quickly determine a weld´s thermal properties and strength.
Much of MEDRAD´s research deals with the most efficient yet safest way to deliver diagnostic fluids into a patient´s body. And while fluid dynamics plays a crucial role in such studies, their models sometimes also involve heat transfer, electrostatics, chemical engineering, electromagnetics, and other physics.
With the help of multiphysics modeling, a group of researchers at the NATO Undersea Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy, are studying how to use low-frequency echoes to determine what an object is made of. Here, they are required to couple acoustics with the structural properties of such objects, while also considering Lamb waves.
Semiconductor wafer manufacturing involves a number of processes, ranging in size from nanometers to meters. This, along with coupling the physics of chemical kinetics, EM fields and CFD, makes for one sophisticated model!
TRW Automotive Engine Components develops, tests and manufactures components for electromagnetic valve-train systems. To optimize the electromagnets and speed this technology to market, TRW engineers found that simulating the electromagnetic properties of their systems to be very helpful.
SARA, Inc. is using COMSOL Multiphysics project to develop an antenna that supports directed transmissions of high-power microwaves (hpms). Such is used in a non-lethal weapon that blows out the defense, vehicle, and communications systems of a national enemies and fleeing criminals.
Modeling has become invaluable in MKS Instruments' development of first-class mass-flow controllers for the process industry. They have gained a detailed understanding of the complex gas dynamics in their instruments. With that knowledge they've achieved accuracy that clearly stands out as superior in the industry.
XEUS (The X-Ray Evolving Universe Spectrometer) is a mission being conducted by the European Space Agency with the goal of gaining a better view of the universe and the Big Bang. Time´s earliest black holes and galaxy clusters leave behind signatures in the form of X-rays that we can measure.
Wouldn't it be a great service for the diagnosing and treating genetic of diseases if physicians had a disposable instrument for detecting DNA that worked as simply and quickly as today's home-pregnancy tests? This isn´t such a farfetched proposition thanks to advances in microfluidic-based concepts.
Only through advanced packaging techniques can we take advantage of state-of-the-art microelectronic devices. The flip-chip method has become a cost-effective means of erasing many packaging and thermal issues that could spell disaster for high-density, high-power integrated circuits.
Required for simulating optical systems is the capacity to handle arbitrary geometries, individual and coupled processes, user-defined governing equations, vector equations, inhomogeneous and anisotropic material properties, complex numbers, freely prescribed boundary and initial conditions and full access to the solvers via a scripting program.
With air pollution on the rise and the EPA heading it off with strict regulations, auto manufacturers look to multiphysics modeling to take a serious bite out of engine emissions. Fleetguard brought about a series of major advances when they began optimizing the performance of an electrostatic particle separator through COMSOL simulations.
Ronald W. Gamache is the director of Research and Development with TransTech Systems, Inc. The company offers a wide range of products for asphalt paving and has achieved a worldwide reputation for innovation across various levels of the roadbuilding industry. By using COMSOL they acquired new insights into their sensor technology.
Amsterdam Water Supply AWS of the Netherlands produces some of the cleanest drinking water in the world, almost 100 million cubic meters per year in fact. They take the water from the Rhine River and purify it in a 14-step process. COMSOL Multiphysics helps them fine tune what happens during this process.
Porous air bearings are a critical element of high-precision machinery thanks to their essentially frictionless operation, high speed, and accuracy. Thanks to their use of multiphysics modeling, engineers at ASM essentially eliminated the need for more than one prototype of a new bearing design before going into production.
The image of a physician performing a bedside diagnosis might not be one that comes to mind when thinking of the typical person performing computational simulations. However, this technology has spread into so many areas and has become so accessible to the practicing scientist and engineer that there´s hardly a "typical" modeler any more.
A self-propelled, remote-controlled micro-robot revolutionizes heart surgery via more effective 'peep hole operations' - and the same technology also leads to cheaper flights by reducing the air resistance around an aircraft in half. These widely differing applications may be the result of a basic research project on micro-robots.
In this rapidly developing and highly competitive market, the time from idea to prototype has shrunk. Therefore, tools for developing virtual prototypes have become exceptionally important. Optimizing a fuel cell´s performance in combination with its auxiliary equipment and operation of the electric motor requires a lot of mathematical puzzling.
"Free" neutrons are hardly free at all when it comes to money - actually, it takes enormously sophisticated equipment to create them, and only a handful of places on earth do it. Who needs free neutrons, anyway? Developers of advanced materials, new biotechniques, and cold fusion make just a few candidates.
UTRC brings their vast experience to bear on designing ways to snuff out fires with inert gas. For their work, a single COMSOL file contains a number of different physics models which they connect and control with ODEs. The physics account for the gas discharge, the room pressures, chemical reactions, and heat transfer.
Dr. Roger Thunvik and Robinah Kulabako of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm use COMSOL Multiphysics to define just how the water contamination evolves in the densely populated lowlands fringing Kampala, so they can stamp out the problems with low cost remediation schemes.
Dr. Ernst develops cold crucibles that melt incredibly hot metals and other materials without letting the melt touch the container walls. With these methods he can refine ultra-pure titanium and other materials. His approach combines electric currents, induction, heat transfer, and magnetic levitation.
Automotive and other vehicular applications place their own special requirements on fuel cells. In designing a cell, many things comes into play: cell potential, the pressure of the gas in the anode and the cathode, relative humidity, and even the dimensions of key elements, among them the membrane and the gas channels.
Drilling an oil well requires a good knowledge of the subsoil. Electrical imaging provides a fuzzy picture of underground structures, which needs to be improved in order to receive a decent knowledge of the subsoil. Experts at Schlumberger carry out simulations with COMSOL Multiphysics to sharpen the image and analyze the crisp snapshots that result.
Ultrasound technology is able to produce stronger paper, reduce costs, and provide a global solution to the problem of wastewater. This has all been possible since a growing company, Ultra Sonus, Öregrund, developed a fifty year-old technology that was previously only used at the lab-scale.
COMSOL Multiphysics in Research and Development
In flameless combustion, air and fuel entering the chamber are mixed with high-temperature recirculated exhaust gases that provide the activation energy needed to initiate and maintain the reaction throughout the chamber. It is important that the fuel and air are injected in such a way that they force recirculation evenly throughout the chamber.
The comprehensive report on simulation speed and version 3.4 comes in the form of a scientifically conducted benchmark study by Dr. Darrell W. Pepper of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Dr. Xiuling Wang of Purdue University-Calumet.
In their efforts to use metamaterials to construct the world´s first working prototype of an invisibility cloak, researchers relied on modeling to lead them to the materials and designs that would make this sci-fi dream a reality. This work was acknowledged by Science magazine as being among the most important scientific breakthroughs of 2006.
The least-explored region of the electromagnetic spectrum consists of terahertz waves, which at 100 GHz to 10 THz fall between microwaves and infrared light. Only in recent years has the development of suitable waveguides for the technical maturation and widespread commercialization of T-ray technology started.
Railguns-which propel a projectile using electromagnetic forces´ promise to revolutionize projectile launchers. To adequately design them, researchers must understand the inner workings of these weapons. Here, using modeling, Dr. Paul Cote makes his contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon.
The "hydrogen economy" aims to reduce the USA´s reliance on imported fossil fuels along with the emission of greenhouse gases. Funding for alternative cycles is limited, so modeling identifies designs that are likely to be successful. Using computational simulation, Argonne was able to quickly get answers to questions that helped with their decision-making.
Making sense of the contractions and dilations in the heart requires far more than simply considering how mechanical deformations force blood through hollows in cardiac tissue. Also to be considered is the transfer of charged ions in heart tissue that produces electrical pulses to trigger the mechanical contractions.
Researchers have been exploring for an accurate yet non-invasive method of predicting eye diseases at earlier stages than are currently possible. One potential diagnostic method is to measure the ocular surface temperature (OST) and compare thermal variations in the eyeball to computer models as well as clinical data.
Simulation of salt diffusion in a pork side is a relatively complex task since such often consists of different regions of skin, meat, fat and bone; each with diffusion coefficients that can vary by orders of magnitude. Adding to this complexity is the arbitrary shape and topology of each region separately and combined.
How relaxed protein strands loop and lace or "fold" controls the form they take and the functions they perform in the human body. If the stretched out chains of amino acids slip into a particular knot you get hemoglobin that carries oxygen through the blood. A different 3D lace becomes an antibody to fight infection.
The process of manufacturing nanowires-the smallest possible threads-is not wholly understood. Prof. Stig Stenström of Lund University in Sweden created a COMSOL Multiphysics model of nanowire growth to help researchers understand and better exploit the underlying phenomena.
A group of scientists from three institutions are researching how to use information about electromagnetic fields in volcanoes to investigate and observe their activity and ultimately predict volcanic crises. Powerful simulations gives them deeper insights into volcanic processes and moves them a step closer to more accurate predictions.
How easy is it to set up a multiphysics model to perform the fluid-structure interaction that occurs within sail design? Professor L. Teresi decided to find out. In principle, The physics describing the structural mechanics of the sail was directly coupled to the viscous and momentum forces resulting from the flow model - multiphysics.
In 1949, Professor Stiefel rented the Zuse Z4 for complex calculations. It used 2200 relays and a mechanical memory of 64 words. He first used this machine to solve a 4th order partial differential equation related to the damming of a water reservoir and to solve a system of eight ordinary differential equations to calculate rocket light.
COMSOL in Education
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. “COMSOL is something that chemical engineers can jump right into and readily use."
Keeping your engineering skills up to date and career on track requires constant learning. When it comes to continuing education for professional engineers, perhaps no institution offers a greater degree of engineering expertise and flexibility than Rensselaer at Hartford, Connecticut, a branch campus of the technology-based education and academic research leader Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
An undergraduate heat transfer course uses COMSOL Multiphysics to help students design the cooling of a motorcycle engine block. Students were able to create their designs in the SolidWorks CAD package, and then bring these into the COMSOL modeling environment. Here, they could easily perform heat transfer analyses.
Partial differential equations form the theoretical basis for ready-to-use modeling packages in transport phenomena. Understanding the implementation and getting quick results move the PDEs from an abstract and theoretical level to a more concrete and practical level - the equations come to life.
As part of a course in biomedical engineering, Dr. Hart gives assignments that require the students to create models in COMSOL Multiphysics. In addition, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers working under Dr. Hart use the software to find new knowledge about how bones react to physical stress and other stimuli.
With the advent of Comsol Multiphysics and other software packages we are now able to take chemical reaction engineering (cre) to new levels of analysis in our graduate and undergraduate courses as well as for the practicing engineer. We can usolve the PDEs that arise in developing models for a variety of reaction engineering problems/systems.