Energy and telecom cables often journey through harsh environments to reach their destinations. Some cables are responsible for carrying high currents and must navigate in conditions that include high thermal loads, mechanical loads, and limited ventilation. We recently published a story in the IEEE Spectrum Insert, Multiphysics Simulation, explaining how the Prysmian Group, a leader in developing cable systems across many industries, has begun using COMSOL Multiphysics to improve their development process, save resources, and optimize their cable designs.

The power electronics industry is responsible for products used by billions of people: smartphones, televisions, certain car parts, and even components in motors and household objects. With such a diverse array of applications, many design requirements are considered during the making of these products, including power and energy density, cost, and customer safety. Arkansas Power Electronics International (APEI), a USA-based company, is refining designs for power packaging to control thermal management in power electronics devices, increase efficiency, and lower cost.

Using the Graphics window in COMSOL Multiphysics can be a little tricky if you’re not too familiar with what it can do. But once you know the shortcuts, controlling the camera and view angles to create good graphics becomes quite straightforward. I hope the techniques shown here will help you produce graphics to visualize and present your work more easily.

Keeping the inside of a building at a comfortable temperature requires well designed windows to keep heat out during the summer and heat in during the winter. Let’s take a look at how windows provide thermal insulation and how they carry heat (or not) between the inside of a building and the outdoors.

You may not think of reheating food in the microwave as a drying process, but as we saw at the COMSOL Conference 2013 Boston, microwave technology — the same technology used in domestic microwave ovens — can be used for drying fruits and vegetables. One poster presented at the conference featured microwave drying of potatoes and how the heat and mass transfer that occurs can be modeled to predict the drying process.

When you have solved a model, you want to visualize your results in the best way possible. Today, we will explain how to include geometry surfaces with your solution plots, by way of an RF modeling example.

Superconductors are used in applications where high current density and magnetic fields are present — including electric generators, biomagnetic technology, and common products, such as fast digital circuits. Theoretically, an unlimited amount of current can flow through a wire made of a superconducting material. However, what happens to a superconductor as the current density exceeds critical limits? Let’s find out.

Have you ever wondered why boaters wear polarized sunglasses? It’s because sunlight reflecting off the water is primarily polarized in one direction, and polarized sunglasses will block this component of the reflected light, thus reducing glare. To understand why this is, we can use COMSOL software. This example solves the governing Maxwell’s equations using the RF Module or Wave Optics Module to simulate light incident at an angle upon a dielectric medium, and the solution shows agreement with analytic solutions.

An RF MEMS switch is an electromechanical component found in RF systems. It usually consists of a micromechanical bridge or cantilever, a substrate, and an electrode or dielectric layer. These devices can switch at RF frequencies and tend to have high isolation, i.e. power loss when the switch turns off; low insertion loss (loss of signal power when the switch is on), and extremely low (almost zero!) power consumption. Let’s take a look at how you can use COMSOL Multiphysics […]