Sweeps are very useful for characterizing a system and learning more about how different input values impact the results. You can perform several different types of sweeps in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software, including function, material, and parametric sweeps. However, precise and innovative simulation results also call for mathematical optimization. In this blog post, learn how to combine sweep studies with the built-in optimization functionality.

To optimize your modeling processes, there are a number of built-in materials available for you to use in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software. Along with these materials are features and functionality that allow you to efficiently assign materials to geometric entities in your model. These tools help expedite the process of assigning materials, specifying material properties, and even comparing the impact of different materials on your simulation results. Here, we’ll highlight three tutorial videos that showcase how to use such tools.

When modeling a manufacturing process, such as the heating of an object, it is possible for irreversible damage to occur due to a change in temperature. This may even be a desired step in the process. With the Previous Solution operator, we can model such damage in COMSOL Multiphysics. Here, we will look at the “baking off” of a thin coating on a wafer heated by a laser.

High-intensity lasers incident upon a material that is partially transparent will deposit power into the material itself. If the absorption of the incident light can be described by the Beer-Lambert law, it is possible to model this power deposition using the core functionality of COMSOL Multiphysics. We will demonstrate how to model the absorption of the laser light and the resultant heating for a material with temperature-dependent absorptivity.

Nonlinear elastic materials present nonlinear stress-strain relationships even at infinitesimal strains — as opposed to hyperelastic materials, where stress-strain curves become significantly nonlinear at moderate to large strains. Important materials of this class are Ramberg-Osgood for modeling metals and other ductile materials and nonlinear soils models, such as the Duncan-Chang model.

You can generate and visualize randomized material data with specified statistical properties determined by a spectral density distribution by using the tools available under the Results node in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software. In this blog post, we show examples that are quite general and have potential uses in many application areas, including heat transfer, structural mechanics, subsurface flow, and more.

In today’s blog post, we will introduce a procedure for thermally modeling a material with hysteresis, which means that the melting temperature is different from the solidification temperature. Such behavior can be modeled by introducing a temperature-dependent specific heat function that is different if the material has been heated or cooled past a certain point. We can implement this behavior in COMSOL Multiphysics via the Previous Solution operator and a little bit of equation-based modeling. Let’s find out how…

A question that we are asked all of the time is if COMSOL Multiphysics can model laser-material interactions and heating. The answer, of course, depends on exactly what type of problem you want to solve, as different modeling techniques are appropriate for different problems. Today, we will discuss various approaches for simulating the heating of materials illuminated by laser light.

We often get requests of the type “I would like to just enter my measured stress-strain curve directly into COMSOL Multiphysics”. In this new blog series, we will take a detailed look at how you can process and interpret material data from tests. We will also explain why it is not a good idea to just enter a simple stress-strain curve as input.