The AC/DC Module sets the stage for the simulation and modeling the performance of resistors, capacitors, inductors, coils, motors, and sensors. Although these devices are principally characterized by electromagnetics, they are also influenced by other types of physics. Thermal effects, for instance, can change electrical properties of materials, while electromechanical deflections due to electrostatic attraction or magnetic fields need to be fully understood during any design process.

With functionality designed for the needs of the electrical and electromechanical engineer, the capabilities of the AC/DC Module span electrostatic, magnetostatic, and low-frequency, electromagnetic phenomena, with unlimited couplings to other physics.

When considering your electrical components as part of a larger system, the AC/DC Module also lets you couple your component-level finite element model to a SPICE model of a complete electrical system. You can then extend your analysis by running a single simulation of a mixed system of lumped and high-fidelity models.

The Acoustics Module is a world-class solution to all your acoustics simulation and modeling needs. Easy-to-use application modes provide the tools to model acoustic wave propagation in air, water, other fluids—and even solids.

It is designed specifically for those who work in classical acoustics with devices that produce, measure, and utilize acoustic waves. Just a few application areas from the audio industry include speakers, microphones, and hearing aids, while those for noise control can address muffler design, sound barriers, and building acoustics.

The modeling of acoustics-structure interaction is easily done with the Acoustics Module. This capability is particularly attractive for applications such as the design of sonar transducers in medical and non-destructive testing applications as well as those used for noise and vibration analyses.

This module also features a special interface for modeling aeroacoustics, which is especially useful for the control of aircraft engine noise. In addition, its general multiphysics ability enhances classical acoustics with further accuracy.

The Batteries & Fuel Cells Module is a specialized tool designed to model and simulate all types of battery and fuel cell (FC) applications. The Module features tailored general interfaces to study primary, secondary and tertiary current density distributions in electrochemical cells, and specialized interfaces for lithium-ion, nickel-metal hydride and lead-acid battery chemistries.

The modeled cells can contain solid or porous electrodes and dilute or concentrated electrolytes. Additional multiphysics couplings such as heat transfer, fluid flow and chemical species transport can be added through the multiphysics capabilities of COMSOL.

Collaboration within design teams is made easy with the CAD interoperability tools for COMSOL. The CAD Import Module brings in all major CAD formats directly into the COMSOL Desktop where you can simulate your design accurately, using a real-world multiphysics model.

The CAD Import Module includes the Parasolid geometry kernel which enables powerful repair and defeaturing tools. The interactive repair feature assures that imported geometries are mathematically correct for simulation. And, in order to cut down on unnecessary details in your CAD geometries, defeaturing tools that remove fillets, small faces, sliver faces, as well as spikes or short edges are included.

The CFD module is tailored for advanced flow simulations. Ready-to-use interfaces let you model laminar and turbulent flows in single or multiple phases. Functionality for treating coupled free and porous media flow, stirred vessels, and fluid structure interaction (FSI) are also included.

The ready coupling of heat and mass transport to fluid flow enables modeling of a wide range of industrial applications such as heat exchangers, turbines, seperation units, and ventilation systems.

Together with COMSOL Multiphysics, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Module takes flow simulations to a new level, allowing for arbitrary coupling to physics interfaces describing other physical phenomena, such as structural mechanics, electromagnetics, or even user defined transport equations. This allows for effortless modeling of any Multiphysics application involving fluid flow.

The Chemical Reaction Engineering Module is tailor-made to study reacting systems including the effects of material and energy transport.

Starting with space-independent models, the module has tools to investigate kinetics using different chemistries, under the controlled conditions typical for laboratory scale and bench scale. To simulate realistic operating conditions, the module uses these chemistries and then includes the effects of space variations in composition and temperature.

The module targets industrial applications including the design of sensors in analytical instruments, catalysts and filter design in automotive exhaust systems, and process and product development of consumer products, fine and specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and bulk chemical processing.

The Chemical Engineering Module and the Reaction Engineering Module have been replaced with the new Chemical Reaction Engineering Module in COMSOL Multiphysics 4.0a

Ready-made interfaces make it easy to simulate single and coupled processes related to subsurface flow. The module is well suited for studies in oil and gas flow in porous media, the modeling of groundwater flow, and the spread of pollution through soil.

A variety of specialized interfaces are available for easy application of the Richards and Navier-Stokes equations, Darcy’s law, and Brinkman’s extension of Darcy’s law. In addition, the module handles the transport and reaction of solutes as well as heat transport in porous media.

The Earth Science Module provides examples to demonstrate multiphysics modeling of geophysical and environmental problems with arbitrary couplings to other application modes in COMSOL Multiphysics®, such as solid deformation and electromagnetics.

Almost every manufacturing process and product design must consider the effect of thermal fluctuations. The Heat Transfer Module provides a combination of simulation capabilities to model heat transfer via conduction, convection, and radiation, as well as the ability to couple these to other physics.

The Heat Transfer Module has modeling interfaces that are specifically written for the user interested in free and forced convection, process design, phase change modeling, radiative heat transfer through both transparent and semi-transparent participating media, as well as couplings between all of these effects. Specialized formulations are included for users who are interested in the heating of living tissue. With boundary conditions for describing convective and radiative effects, contact resistance, as well as thin highly-conductive shells, you can simulate anything from a simple "back of the envelope" model to a full model with all effects explicitly described.

Since all material properties are functions of temperature, you can conceivably couple a thermal model to any other physical model, while COMSOL also allows you to include heat generation from any other physics into a thermal model.

The LiveLink for Inventor delivers a seamless integration of CAD and simulation. By establishing an associative connection between the two applications, a change of a feature in the CAD model automatically updates the geometry in COMSOL Multiphysics, while retaining physics settings. All parameters specified in Autodesk® Inventor® can be interactively linked with your simulation geometry. This enables multiphysics simulation involving parametric sweeps and design optimization directly from within the CAD program.

The LiveLink for Inventor includes all the capabilities of the CAD Import Module. This lets you import and defeature files from all major CAD packages.

Seamlessly integrate COMSOL Multiphysics with MATLAB to extend your modeling with scripting and to build your own applications that incorporate your models. The LiveLink for MATLAB lets you utilize the full power of MATLAB and its toolboxes in preprocessing, model manipulation and postprocessing to:

• Preprocess data, such as from images or experiments, to be included as geometries or material properties within your models
• Manipulate your model from the command line to customize and parameterize the geometry, physics, or solution scheme to, for example, optimize topology
• Extract data from models for postprocessing and extended visualization
• Deploy your models to people in your organization that are required to only manipulate specific parameters you provide
• Interface COMSOL Multiphysics simulations to computations performed in other simulators

The LiveLink for Pro/ENGINEER deliver a seamless integration of CAD and simulation. By establishing an associative connection between the two applications, a change of a feature in the CAD model automatically updates the geometry in COMSOL Multiphysics, while retaining physics settings. All parameters specified in Pro/ENGINEER can be interactively linked with your simulation geometry. This enables multiphysics simulation involving parametric sweeps and design optimization directly from within the CAD program.

The LiveLink for Pro/ENGINEER includes all the capabilities of the CAD Import Module. This lets you import and defeature files from all major CAD packages.

The LiveLink for SolidWorks delivers a seamless integration of CAD and simulation. By establishing an associative connection between the two applications, a change of a feature in the CAD model automatically updates the geometry in COMSOL Multiphysics, while retaining physics settings. All parameters specified in SolidWorks can be interactively linked with your simulation geometry. This enables multiphysics simulation involving parametric sweeps and design optimization directly from within the CAD program.

The LiveLink for SolidWorks includes all the capabilities of the CAD Import Module. This lets you import and defeature files from all major CAD packages.

The design and modeling of microscale electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) is a unique engineering discipline. At small length scales, designs must consider the effects of several physical phenomena. For example: electromagnetic-structural, thermal-structural, and fluid-structural interactions (FSI) are typical issues in the design of resonators, sensors, actuators, piezoelectric, and microfluidics systems.

The MEMS Module solves problems that couple structural mechanics, microfluidics, and electromagnetics. These physics can be solved individually, or in any arbitrary combination. Special formulations exist for electrostatic actuation, piezoelectrics, microfluidics, thin film damping, FSI, joule heating with thermal expansion, two-phase flow, and others. Lumped parameter extraction and connection to external electrical circuits via SPICE netlist is made easy. Built upon the core capabilities of COMSOL Multiphysics, the MEMS Module can be used to address almost all simulations in the microscale domain.

COMSOL Multiphysics gives you complete control over definitions and use of your material properties through the Model Builder and Material Browser. The Material Browser allows you to manage all your model’s materials in one place, and can be complemented by the Material Library. This contains data for 2500 materials including the elements, minerals, metal alloys, thermal insulators, semiconductors, and piezoelectric materials.

Each material is represented by referenced property functions for as many as 24 key properties, dependent on some variable, typically temperature. You can plot and inspect these function definitions, as well as change and add to them. They can then be used in any coupling to other physics simulations that also depend on the property function variable in your multiphysics modeling.

No matter the engineering discipline, once you have a model of a product or a process, you want to improve upon it. The Optimization Module can be used throughout the COMSOL Multiphysics product family, it is a general interface for computing optimal solutions to engineering problems. Model inputs such as part shapes, material properties, or material distribution, can be treated as design variables, and any model output can be an objective function.

The Optimization Module computes the analytic sensitivities of the objective function to the design variables, considers any constraints imposed upon the problem, and uses a gradient-based optimization technique to find optimal designs. Based upon the SNOPT code developed by Philip E. Gill of the University of California San Diego, and Walter Murray and Michael A. Saunders of Stanford University, the Optimization Module can be used to solve shape, size, and topology optimization problems, as well as inverse problems such as parameter estimation.

With a very general interface, the capabilities of the Optimization Module can be used in conjunction with any combination of other COMSOL products.

Low temperature plasmas represent the amalgamation of fluid mechanics, reaction engineering, physical kinetics, heat transfer, mass transfer and electromagnetics. The Plasma Module is a specialized tool for modeling non-equilibrium discharges which occur in a wide range of engineering disciplines. There are specialized modeling interfaces for the most common types of plasma reactors including Inductively coupled plasmas (ICP), DC discharges, Wave heated discharges (Microwave plasmas) and Capacitively coupled plasmas (CCP).

Simulating the interaction between the plasma and an external circuit is an important part of understanding the overall characteristics of a discharge. The Plasma Module provides tools to add circuit elements directly to a 1D, 2D or 3D model, or import an existing SPICE netlist into the model. The plasma chemistry is specified either by loading in sets of collision cross sections from a file, or by adding reactions and species to the model builder. The complicated coupling between the different physics which constitute a plasma is automatically handled by the physics interfaces.

Modeling of ICP and Microwave plasmas may additionally require the AC/DC Module or the RF Module, or both.

Modeling in the RF, microwave and optical regimes requires modeling the propagation of electromagnetic waves in and around structures that can be metallic, dielectric, gyromagnetic, or even metamaterials with engineered properties. The RF Module offers you the tools to meet this challenge by including port and scattering boundary conditions, complex, anisotropic material models, perfectly matched layers, and the best solvers available. As a result, you can easily model antennas, waveguides, microwave and optical components.

The RF Module completes the modeling experience by providing advanced post-processing features such as S-parameter computation and far-field analysis. Taken together with COMSOL’s unsurpassed ability to couple to other physics, such as electromagnetic heating, you have the industry’s leading multiphysics solution for electromagnetic waves.

The Structural Mechanics Module is dedicated to the analysis of components and subsystems where it is necessary to evaluate deformations under loads. It also contains special physics interfaces for the modeling of shells, beams and trusses.

Physics interfaces in this module solve stationary and dynamic models, including nonlinear problems, and let you perform eigenfrequency (i.e. modal), parametric, quasi-static and frequency-response analyses. 3D solid as well as 2D plane stress, plane strain and axisymmetric analyses allow the specification of elastoplastic and hyperelastic material laws, large deformations, contact, piezoelectric analysis, and thermoelasticity.

The Structural Mechanics Module works in tandem with COMSOL Multiphysics and the other discipline-specific modules to couple structural analysis into any multiphysics phenomenon.