Modelling environment FEMLABO

Citation

(2002), "Modelling environment FEMLABO", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 74 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2002.12774cab.012

Modelling environment FEMLABO

Keywords: Engineering, Research, Software

Scientific software developer COMSOL recently announced the launch of its UK operations with the opening of a sales and support office in The Oxford Science Park. Its multiphysics modelling environment FEMLAB is said to be widely used, claiming outstanding usability and flexibility for research, design and optimisation of technical equipment and processes. COMSOL's customers include leading hi-tech companies and universities world-wide.

According to Cosmol, being exceptionally easy-to-use and quick to operate, FEMLAB is rapidly becoming the preferred tool for virtual phototyping and research within many engineering and scientific fields: Chemical Engineering, Photonics and Optoelectronics, Electromagnetics, Fuel Cell Technology, Structural Analysis and Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics.

"We have received an immense interest on our visits here during the past year. Now that we have the UK as home ground we will be able to focus completely on our users and prospects here, which are generally very skilled modellers, and support them in getting the most out of our products. I really feel that we have something fresh to offer the UK engineering community – FEMLAB's pioneering ease-of-use, and its applicability to all aspects of engineering", says Patrik Bosander, managing director of COMSOL Ltd.

COMSOL Ltd will embark an intense marketing campaign in order to establish FEMLAB as the modelling tool of choice. It has participated in several conferences, trade shows and seminars in the U K recently.

FEMLAB is said to represent a groundbreaking new concept through its graphically embedded model interpreter, translating physics models directly into numerical code. This reportedly enables the user to quickly draw geometries, apply ready- to-use equations and solvers, using as leverage recent years' explosive development of computer processing power. All is done through a graphical user interface (GUI), with an ease and speed that was inconceivable just a few years ago, when primitive models had to be coded, or specialised simulation packages had to be run on mainframe computers. Modelling has traditionally been time-consuming and costly, and something exclusively reserved for experts. It is asserted by Comsol that every engineer can instantly try out ideas and new design on a normal PC, using FEMLAB. This it believes adds immense value to research and business, as time and effort can be spent on equipment design and process optimisation, and not on the mechanics of developing numerical code.

In the academic world, FEMLAB is stated to be rapidly gaining ground as a tool for research and teaching of engineering and science. Imagine students being able to quickly try out and play around with different geometries, equations and material properties – creating virtual prototypes – in order to explore the physics, instead of having textbooks and lectures as the sole source of information. FEMLAB is claimed to lend itself to modelling within all engineering and scientific fields, facilitating a single platform for teaching and research. Several universities have already acquired site or multiple-user licenses for FEMLAB, including America's Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, and Imperial College, London.

"Since we purchased FEMLAB in April it has been used constantly by all members of our research group. The simple to use user interface has allowed non-specialists to quickly solve a wide range of problems and has opened many new opportunities for our work", says Dr. Julian Burt at the Institute of Bioelectronic and Molecular Microsystems, University of Wales.

"The flexibility and user-friendliness of FEMLAB in simulating chemical reactions and engineering problems could well result in a paradigm shift in this field, one that's been dominated by simpler families of 1-dimensional models, to more advanced PDE modelling", comments Pehr Bjornbom, professor of chemical reaction engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm.

Interestingly, two of today's most promising research areas have been early in embracing FEMLAB those of photonics and fuel cells. Both have seen enormous investments and research efforts being put in over the past decade. Both are also characterised by an environment in which small research groups and start-up companies are capable of competing with large successful ones in developing technology with instant and immense market impact. Speed is key, and this is how FEMLAB is said to be adding value – through drastically shortening the time between idea and prototype, hence boosting the product development cycle.

FEMLAB is a Finite Element Method (FEM) based modelling package developed by COMSOL. The product suite comprises tailored modelling solutions for Structural Mechanics, Chemical Engineering and Electromagnetics. It is said to facilitate modelling of all physical phenomena based on Partial Differential Equations, PDES, such as heat transfer and fluid flow.

The numerical engine is built around an arbitrary system of non-linear partial differential equations, which is handled by built-in solvers based on the Finite Element Method, FEM. Solvers are provided for various problem classes, includes linear, non- linear, stationary, time-dependent, and eigenvalue cases. There are direct, iterative, multigrid, and adaptive meshing solvers. FEMLAB 2.1 came with the high-index time stepping method DASPK 2.0 implemented in co-operation with Professor Linda Petzold and Dr Shengtai Li at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Comsol explains that he model equations, or physics, can either be applied by the user in a ready-to-use form, or given freely to suit any type of physical phenomenon, may it be linear, non-linear or time dependent. Several problems can be combined and coupled in a single model – Multiphysics – the benefit being a very straightforward modelling process, with a minimum of non-realistic assumptions.

FEMLAB is built on top of MATLAB (developed by The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA), FEMLAB models can be extended with MATLAB script programming, or alternatively, can be saved as MATLAB scripts and incorporated in other MATLAB applications. FEMLAB also provides a direct link to the dynamic simulation environment Simulink. This is said to give unrestricted freedom to combine physics modelling, simulation and analysis with a host of applications in engineering and science.

At any point while a pre-configured modelling method is running, the user can pause the process, evaluate its progress and methodology, and proceed with either the standard method or branch off into a new modelling approach. The combination of easy modelling, easy customisation and quick improvisational ability is thought to make FEMLAB a tool useful for both high- performance computations as well as for quick feasibility studies.

FEMLAB runs under Windows 95/98, NT 4.0, 2000, and versions are available for Sun Solaris, Linux, AIX, Digital Unix, HP-UX, IRIX, COMPAQ Tru64, and Macintosh. It also requires that MATLAB 5.3 or higher be installed. The recommended hardware configuration is 128M bytes of RAM for modelling in 2-D, 256M bytes of RAM for modelling in 3-D, and 16-bit colour graphics.

Details available from: COMSOL Ltd. Tel: +44 (0) 1 865 3 38 036; Fax: +44 (0) 1 865 3 38 106; Website: http://www.uk.comsol.com