All posts by James Ransley

Piezoelectric Materials: Applying the Standards
Previously on the blog, we detailed the standards employed to describe piezoelectric materials. There are two piezoelectric material standards supported in COMSOL Multiphysics: the IRE 1949 standard and the IEEE 1978 standard. Today, we will demonstrate how to set up the orientation of a crystal, specifically an AT cut quartz plate, within both standards.

Piezoelectric Materials: Understanding the Standards
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.

Molecular Flow Module: Simulate Rarefied Gas Flows in Vacuum Systems
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.