Tips & Tricks

User-Defined Material Library

User-defined materials provide the flexibility needed to design models using a combination of existing material properties and properties defined by the user. These material properties can also be included in a user-developed material database for easy access to frequently used materials. Users often spend significant time developing models with material properties not available in the

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Anisotropic Material Properties

Many of the simulations we have developed through the years include materials that behave anisotropically. This class of materials has different material properties in different directions. This anisotropy often needs to be included in computational models to achieve the desired level of accuracy in the simulation outputs. If the material coordinate system of the anisotropic

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Continuity Pairs for Electrical and Thermal Contact

Thermal stresses are an important design concern for many engineering applications.  When temperatures change, materials can deform or warp leading to the build-up of internal stresses even without the presence of external constraints which can further increase thermal stresses.  Modeling and simulation can calculate the deformations, stresses and changing contact pressures using thermal-structural interaction techniques. 

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Using Evaluation Operator in Post-Processing

Engineers post process their simulation results for reasons that range from better understanding their results to communicating those results to others.  Developing labels that clearly identify the conditions for a simulation communicates the critical input parameters for the plotted results. In this Tip and Trick, the simulation engineers at AltaSim will show a way to

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Electromagnetic Wave Polarization in 2D Geometry

An electromagnetic wave consists of a coupled oscillating electric field and magnetic field which are always perpendicular to each other. By convention, the “polarization” of electromagnetic waves refers to the direction of the electric field. In 3D geometry, arbitrary polarization is naturally defined by the prescribing the directions of all three components of the electric

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Selection of Exterior Boundaries

At virtually every step of the model creation process, you need to select and apply materials, physics boundary conditions, and other settings to your model geometry. Bookkeeping of these settings can be challenging, especially when you re dealing with large, complex geometries and multiple physics interfaces. In COMSOL Multiphysics, Selections provides a tool to organize your model

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