Editor contact:
Tony DePasqua, Marketing Assistant
phone: 781-273-3322 fax: 781-273-6603
e-mail: tony@comsol.com
Reader inquiries:
Svante Littmarck, President, Bertil Waldén, Vice President of Sales
phone: 781-273-3322 fax: 781-273-6603
e-mail: info@comsol.com
company web site: www.comsol.com
COMSOL Launches US Operations,
Introduces Revolutionary Multiphysics Modeling Package
BOSTON, March 2000 —Having enjoyed enormous success in its native Sweden as well as throughout Scandinavia and Europe, software developer COMSOL is bringing its revolutionary FEMLAB package into general release in the United States. To do so, it is setting up operations with a sales and customer-support office in Burlington, MA. It is also embarking on a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign to establish FEMLAB as the state-of-the-art tool of its kind.
Available for all popular operating environments including Windows and Unix, FEMLAB is a modeling and analysis package particularly well suited to the analysis and optimization of chemical processes. Furthermore, the software-which runs on top of MATLAB®, the industry standard tool for technical computing developed by The MathWorks Inc (Natick, MA)-can model virtually any physical phenomena an engineer or scientist can describe with partial differential equations (PDEs) including heat transfer, fluid flow, electromagnetics and structural mechanics.
What makes the software exceptionally powerful is that it can model phenomena that involve several of these disciplines, all at the same time, through the same powerful graphical user interface. This unusual flexibility makes it extremely useful in chemical engineering. Chemical processes are often dependent on several interconnected mechanisms. For example, the analysis of a fuel cell might involve not only chemical reactions and electrical currents but also fluid dynamics and heat transfer. FEMLAB allows users to couple these various transport processes and reactions faster and simpler than with any other software available anywhere at any price: a single-user license for Windows costs only $2,995.
"The flexibility and user friendliness of FEMLAB in simulating chemical reactions and engineering problems could well result in a paradigm shift in this field, one that's been dominated by simpler families of 1-dimensional models, to more advanced PDE modeling," comments Pehr Bjornbom, professor of chemical reaction engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Power as Never Before
"The engineering community has waited a long, long time for a package of this kind," agrees Svante Littmarck, president of COMSOL Inc. "The pieces have fallen into place now that desktop processing power has become affordable, and now that graphics, imaging and visualization capabilities have come to exceed what we could expect from a $100,000 engineering workstation just a few years ago.
"We combine this computational power with deep expertise in process modeling and analytical equation solving. The result is that FEMLAB's capabilities and ease of use are introducing a basic paradigm shift in two ways. First, it will fundamentally change the way engineers do their daily work. They can quickly draw the geometries of a problem and then create code that allows them to perform in just hours the parametric analyses and design optimizations that previously would have taken weeks. We refer to this groundbreaking capability as 'Physics to Code.'
"The second paradigm shift will take place in universities," elaborates Littmarck. "Recall that calculators allowed professors and students to shift their attention from the mechanics of solving analytical problems and instead to concentrate on the underlying principles. Extending this concept, FEMLAB represents a quantum leap in computational capability so large that engineering courses will be able to add enormous new content and reveal to students powerful new ways to look at and analyze processes and systems."
Draw the Process Geometry
FEMLAB makes its considerable computational power available to users through a graphical user interface that allows them to solve complex problems by describing these problems with drawings rather than entering many lines of involved equations. It can also import DXF drawing files from popular CAD software including AutoCAD and CATIA.
"I made a model of a chemical process in just a few days with FEMLAB, but with other packages we had on hand it would've taken several weeks," relates Ed Fontes, who speaks from his experience as an early end user while working as Group Manager of Electrolysis at EKA Chemicals, a position he held prior to joining COMSOL as Product Manager of FEMLAB Chemical Engineering.
Making it even easier to develop applications, FEMLAB bundles a Model Library that shows ready-to-run examples for common situations in multiple application areas. Thus users aren't required to have in-depth knowledge of mathematics or numerical analysis. In fact, they can build many models by means of the physical quantities involved rather than by writing the equations that describe them. Examining these models is also an excellent way of learning how to exploit the full power of FEMLAB within the various application areas. COMSOL has built up a library of more than 80 models, and it also posts user-contributed models on the company web site.
Easy Access to Powerful Equations
The underlying mathematical structure upon which FEMLAB is based is a system of partial differential equations (PDEs), a mathematical description of some physical phenomena based on the laws of science (see the accompanying white paper, "Differential Equations: The Original Enabling Technology"). Anyone who is an expert in his or her field and knows how to set up simulations using PDEs can extend those systems by explicitly modeling in terms of these types of equations.
"FEMLAB is unique with respect to these modeling capabilities," points out Lars Langemyr, COMSOL's Vice President of R&D. "Most systems for physical modeling use hard-coded PDEs targeted to a certain application area. In FEMLAB you can model in terms of the equations themselves using the laws of science."
Open and Extensible
If all of this power isn't sufficient, the structure of FEMLAB ensures that users have access to virtually any conceivable algorithm or scientific-computing tool to help solve a problem.
Users can extend FEMLAB's standard capabilities through simple script programming. At any point while a preconfigured modeling method is running, researchers can pause the process, evaluate its progress and methodology, and proceed either with the standard method or branch off into a new modeling approach. This combination of easy modeling, easy customization and quick improvisational ability make FEMLAB a tool useful for both nonstandard computations as well as for quick research into physics, models and parameters.
In addition, FEMLAB is inherently open and extensible because it's built on top of MATLAB. Users can save models as MATLAB programs or incorporate them with other products in the MATLAB family. This gives them the freedom to combine physical modeling, simulation and analysis with a host of numerous applications in engineering and science.
Another outstanding feature is FEMLAB's automatic code generation for converting a graphically derived physics model to a sequence of MATLAB commands, in essence making possible the highly desirable direct conversion of Physics to Code. This capability is extremely useful for many purposes:
- It documents a researcher's work in an understandable fashion.
- Others can learn how to work with FEMLAB functions by studying generated code.
- Users can export the code, modify it or write iterative algorithms that perform parametric analysis and optimize a design.
- They can start a model in FEMLAB, then convert it to code and perform all manner of experiments using other software tools or algorithms.
System Requirements
FEMLAB runs under Windows 95/98, NT 4.0 or Windows 2000. Versions are additionally available for Solaris, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and IRIX. It also requires that MATLAB 5.3 be installed. The recommended hardware configuration is 128M bytes of RAM and 16-bit color graphics.
Pricing and Availability
The package is shipping from stock. A single-user license for Windows costs $2,995, and the package is also available for Unix. Educational discounts are available.
About the company
COMSOL Inc is located at
1 New England Executive Park, Suite 350
Burlington, MA 01803
Phone: 781-273-3322
Fax: 781-273-6603
Web sites: www.comsol.com, www.femlab.com
COMSOL Inc is the US subsidiary of COMSOL AB, with headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. The privately held firm was initially founded in 1986 by Svante Littmarck, President, and Farhad Saeidi, Vice President, as a software vendor, and a software distributor specializing in products from The MathWorks, Inc. In 1995 COMSOL released its first PDE based product, PDE Toolbox, an add-on for MATLAB. Most recently the company introduced FEMLAB, a MATLAB-based tool for the modeling and simulation of complex problems built around partial differential equations.
