We are excited about the new release of COMSOL Version 6.1 and wanted to share a new feature with you, so we put together this quick video. To help you follow along, we have included the video transcription below.
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COMSOL Version 6.1 Video Transcription:
This is COMSOL version 6.1 their new release and they have a new feature that I wanted to highlight for our customer e-mail list I should say and that is related to the parameters and how you’re able to view the value of a parameter without needing to look in the settings window of Global definitions by hovering over the parameter name which is kind of a nice new feature and so I’d like to show you how that works so I’m just gonna build up an example model here from scratch walking through the model wizard.
I’m going to build a 3D geometry and then add solid mechanics and this part doesn’t necessarily need to be included in the article it’s just to build the demonstration model and the idea here is you can build your model based on what are called global definitions parameters and you can give these unique names so I can say length of the rod and then give it a value of say 6 millimeters and then this would be the length of the rod that’s the description that I just put there and then I could do diameter of the rod let’s make that 1 millimeter.
Then what I can do is maybe then apply a load so let’s call it load_X which is the load in the x-direction we’ll give that one a value of 10 newtons. So I have these various parameters that I can use to build the model so geometric parameters or loading values like the applied force on the rod and then when I begin building the model I could add a cylinder for example and then instead of typing in the radius and the height of the cylinder as numbers instead I’ll use the parameters. Diameter divided by 2 for the radius instead of 1 millimeter divided by 2. And the length parameter instead of 6 millimeters for the height.
What’s new in version 6.1 that we’d like to let our customers know about is that if you hover over these edit fields it will give you the value so diam_rod divided by 2 gives the value as 5 E minus 4 meters if you hover over the length of rod the value 0.006 meters so that corresponds to the values that you typed in here. Previous to version 6.1 of COMSOL you would not know what these values were unless you went back in the model builder tree and clicked here and then you would have to read those from the values list here and then what would happen is you might forget by the time you came back down here so it’s just a nice tool tip that COMSOL has provided for these.
Another example would be if you’re applying a load for example a boundary load on the top of the rod and then you would change it to total force in the x-direction right now it evaluates to zero but I could use the parameter load_X. Put that in to load the system and it’s going to give me the value of 10 newtons. So it’s just another example of the same improvement in 6.1 that we wanted to let our customers know about if they had noticed it already.