All posts by Fanny Griesmer
Modeling a Light Bulb, All Forms of Heat Transfer
When it gets dark, you flick on the lights. If you were to model this simple example, you would need to take all forms of heat transfer within consideration; convection, conduction, and radiation are all at play when a light bulb is flicked on.
3D Printing: Hottest Topic in Manufacturing
Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it is more widely known as, is on everybody’s mind right now. Manufacturing folks, engineers, and even the general public have taken an interest in 3D printing. In other words, this is not just a fascinating phenomenon to those in the industry — additive manufacturing has been generally accepted as the next “cool” thing in manufacturing.
Space Fuel: Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Produce Plutonium-238
The end of July marks the beginning of a $20 million R&D project led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to produce and process plutonium-238. The U.S. space program will be using the Pu-238 that is to be produced by ORNL as fuel for future deep-space missions.
Follow-Up on Venus Transit of the Sun 2012
After reading about the COMSOL users over at MACCOR in David’s blog post I decided to watch Venus’ transit of the Sun live via their online stream from Tulsa, OK. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity that I, like many people around the world, did not want to miss.
News in Particle Tracing for 4.3
There are many exciting new features in the Particle Tracing Module for COMSOL Multiphysics version 4.3. The secondary particle emission feature is particularly fascinating. “This new option for the Wall Condition allows you to model filter multipliers and multipactors, which were previously very difficult to model”, says Dan Smith, Development Team Leader at COMSOL. A mathematical expression, like a logical expression containing the particle energy for instance, can be used to determine the number of secondary particles to be released. […]
Heat Transfer: Accounting for the Radiation of the Sun
Knowing the sun’s radiation and thermal effects is very important to designers within the building industry, especially in designing “green” buildings. Heat transfer also plays a vital role in designing outdoor devices in terms of maintaining temperatures in extreme hot or cold environments. To use the words of Nicolas Huc, project leader for the Heat Transfer Module development at COMSOL in France: “it makes a huge difference if you forget to take the sun’s radiation into account.”