Standards form an integral part of the work we do as engineers, providing a common language for communicating complex information. But standards committees are not omnipotent and sometimes revised standards are not universally adopted. This has happened in the case of the standards for piezoelectric materials, particularly for quartz. This blog post explains the multiple standards used to describe piezoelectrics in literature. Although the particular focus of this post is on quartz, the standards described apply for any piezoelectric material.

Since I joined COMSOL in 2010 I’ve presented about half a dozen webinars. Last week we held a webinar on Vacuum System Simulations and it was definitely the most fun webinar to-date. Historically, simulation has not been used extensively in the vacuum industry, so I was nervous that there wouldn’t be much interest in such a specialized topic.

Vacuum technology has many important applications, from semiconductor device and MEMS fabrication, to vacuum coatings for corrosion protection, optical films, and metallization. The new Molecular Flow Module provides vacuum engineers with previously unavailable tools for modeling gas flows within vacuum systems.