COMSOL Multiphysics^® 5.6 Release Highlights

Geometry and Mesh Updates

COMSOL Multiphysics^® version 5.6 includes several improvements to the geometry and meshing functionality. Read more about these updates below.

Graphics Context Menu for Geometry and Meshing

The Graphics window context menu gives you quick access to geometry and meshing operations that can be applied to the selected entities or objects. In the 2D sketch interface, you can also use this menu to switch between the drawing tools.

Select entities in the Graphics window and right-click to open a menu with options adapted to the current context.

Boundary Layer Meshing on Faces

You can now create a boundary layer mesh for faces in 3D. With this, you can create swept meshes with boundary layer elements using the boundary layer mesh face as the input to your swept mesh.

Create mesh for face (left), insert boundary layer mesh (middle), and sweep boundary layer surface mesh (right).

Models that demonstrate this functionality:

• diesel_particulate_filter
• inline_induction_heater
• pipe_elbow
• pipe_elbow_erosion
• serpentine_flow_field
• steam_reformer

Element Quality Measure for Curved Elements

When you use a nonlinear geometry shape function, the mesh elements are curved to fit the geometry. Use the new Curved skewness quality measure, in the Statistics window or a Mesh plot, to detect potential problems induced by the curving of the elements.

Plot of a coarse mesh (left) and a finer mesh (right). Both meshes are based on a cubic geometry shape order, and the color of the elements indicates the value of the Curved skewness quality measure (where green is good, yellow is OK, and red is bad). Using a finer size, each element becomes less curved, which leads to a better Curved skewness measure.

More Editing and Repairing Tools for Imported Meshes

New tools are available for imported meshes that allow you to do the following:

• Intersect a 3D surface mesh with a plane, or a 2D mesh with a line
• Remesh a surface mesh by using the Free Triangular or Free Quad operation
• Create vertices and partition faces by selecting mesh vertices and edges in the Graphics window

Use the new Intersect with Plane operation to cut and partition the elements of an imported surface mesh, for example, to remove one half of a symmetric mesh. Use the Delete Entities operation to remove the left part of the intersected mesh.

Mesh resulting from the intersect and delete operations (left) and the same part remeshed using the Free Triangular operation (right), preparing it for subsequent modeling.

To repair a small fold in this imported mesh, first use Create Edges to create a face partition along mesh edges selected in the Graphics window. Then delete the small face that contains the fold, and generate a new mesh face with Create Faces. Finally, join the faces to restore to original topology.

Create Meshes from Partition Datasets

Using the Import operation, you can now import a mesh with the mesh data from a Partition dataset.

Mesh created from a Partition dataset defining a Neovius surface.

Lagrange Interpolation Operator

The new operator laginterp(order,expression) evaluates the given expression, in the Lagrange nodes of the given order, within each mesh element, and then interpolates. There are many uses for this operator. One example is to reduce the interpolation order of a field, such as from quadratic to linear shape functions. Another example use is to compute spatial derivatives of an expression for which spatial derivatives are not implemented.