Each year we invest some of our time at the annual COMSOL Conference in Boston during the first week of October. As usual, this investment provided us with the opportunity to grow our relationships with our friends at COMSOL and many of our clients. In addition, we were able to meet many people that were new to COMSOL and the Conference. Below are three specific highlights we wanted to share.
We were fortunate to be able to present some of the work we have conducted with Eric Dunlop of Pan Pacific Technologies in the Simulating Chemical Processes and Devices Session. The session was chaired by Fulya Akpinar from Bristol-Myers Squibb, and she also presented a paper on her work relating to modeling of mixing in pharmaceutical drug batch reactors. This paper described the use of COMSOL to improve success in scaling up their reactors from the lab to plant. By using the rotating machinery capabilities within COMSOL, Akpinar’s group was able to account for the specific reactor geometry in their models. This model included the flow, reaction/transport of species and heat transfer. Using this Multiphysics model, they were able to predict the crystallization process for a batch reactor. Akpinar, et al. received a well-deserved best paper award for their work at the COMSOL Conference.
In addition, Bernard McGarvey from Eli Lilly and Company gave an excellent Keynote speech on how modeling can enable thinking about problems from first principals to improve their process and equipment design. AltaSim has had the pleasure of working with Lilly to help design new products, and they have made great progress through the use of computational modeling. Sebastien Perrier from Echologics Engineering also gave a superb keynote talk on how his company has been able to deploy a COMSOL-based simulation app to help non-engineers make decisions about the location of leaking pipes in municipal infrastructure applications. AltaSim believes that Simulation Apps represent an exciting opportunity for extending the benefits of computational simulations and has developed a series of Simulation Apps that will be available for general use shortly.
COMSOL also released a new version of COMSOL Multiphysics, Server and Client at the Conference. AltaSim has experienced significant challenges developing our larger models in earlier version, but with update 2 of v5.2a focusing on performance issues associated with large geometric models, we can see the improvement in rendering and meshing these models. If you have experienced these types of issues with large models, this new version will noticeably speed up performance.
If you were at the conference let us know what you discovered so that we can pass it on to the community.
Until next time…