PRESS RELEASE

Editor contact:
Adam De Cruz, Marketing Assistant
phone: 781-273-3322 fax: 781-273-6603
e-mail: adam@comsol.com

Reader inquiries:
Svante Littmarck, President; Magnus Ringh, VP of Sales
phone: 781-273-3322 fax: 781-273-6603
e-mail: info@comsol.com
company web site: www.comsol.com

Burlington, MA, December 15, 2000—When it comes to graphics and imaging, the Macintosh has earned a reputation as the personal computer of choice. Even today it continues to dominate in areas such as graphics design and desktop publishing. It's no surprise, then, that software for one of the most graphics intensive of any scientific or technical task -- the modeling of physical phenomena in three dimensions -- should run on the Mac. Towards this goal, Comsol Inc is pleased to announce that it has taken the groundbreaking software it introduced only months ago for PC and workstations, FEMLAB 2.0, and now offers a Macintosh version.

More impressive, FEMLAB is the only multiphysics package with 3D capabilities available for that platform.

FEMLAB is a sophisticated software package whose graphical user interface includes tools that make 3D multiphysics modeling easier than with any other software of its type. Multiphysics is the ability to handle several types of physical problems simultaneously. For instance, multiphysics software can solve equations relating to the chemical reactions going on in a fuel cell while at the same time solving heat-transfer equations and investigating changes in other physical properties.

A powerful interface, combined with FEMLAB 2.0's underlying solvers and multidimensional visualization tools, allow users to create model geometries and solve them on desktop machines in a fraction of the time they would need with other tools. Thanks to this package, they can now tackle tasks that just a few years ago would have required at least a powerful workstation if not a mainframe. Much of that load arose in the computations needed to visualize complex 3D images, an area where the Macintosh has traditionally been strong.

FEMLAB 2.0 runs on any Power Macintosh computer equipped with 128M bytes of memory and running System 7.1 or later. Even though FEMLAB in this case runs on an earlier version of MATLAB than the latest release for a Windows or Unix system, it incurs no penalties. Every command and every function operates to its full potential under this environment.

Portable files and commands

A common user interface and command set was a goal in developing the Mac version. Thus, users can store FEMLAB setup and command files, which they can move among various operating environments and run without any modifications. This portability proves invaluable in large corporations or institutions that have a variety of computing platforms, or when an individual must exchange scientific information with someone at another organization who works on a different type of computer or operating environment.

"FEMLAB is unique with respect to these capabilities," points out Göran Lindbergh, professor of applied electrochemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden). "No other software of its kind can claim to run across different platforms to this degree.

"The fact that FEMLAB runs on a Macintosh leads to the easy exchange of models and results between researchers and scientists in our projects," adds Prof Lindbergh. "Because this package is platform independent, it fits into our heterogeneous computing environment, which is typical of most universities. We're pleased that we won't have to make any investments in hardware to increase our usage of FEMLAB. Today we use that software during research into fuel cells and batteries, but we plan to shortly introduce this software into our curriculum for teaching electrochemistry."

System requirements

FEMLAB 2.0 runs on any Power Macintosh computer equipped with 128M bytes of memory and running System 7.1 or later. It also requires MATLAB 5.2.1 be installed on the system. Recommended are from 256M bytes to 1G byte of memory and at least 16-bit graphics card supported by MATLAB.

Price and availability

FEMLAB 2.0 is shipping from stock. A single-user license for the Macintosh costs $3995. The package is also available with a single-user license and network license for Windows, Linux and 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 and Farhad Saeidi as a software distributor specializing in products from The MathWorks Inc (Natick, MA). In 1995 the principles started writing and distributing specialized add-ons for MATLAB, chief among them the PDE Toolbox. Most recently the company introduced FEMLAB, a MATLAB-based tool for the graphical modeling of complex problems built around partial differential equations.

What FEMLAB Users Are Saying

"I was impressed with how smoothly the program operated from start to finish."

"The flexibility and generality of FEMLAB is unique, and it has allowed us to solve problems that were almost impossible or extremely time-consuming to solve with other packages."

"Without this package we'd have to purchase dedicated programs for each task and struggle to get them to work together"

"I can't live without it!"

FEMLAB Backgrounder

FEMLAB is a modeling and analysis package for virtual prototyping of physical phenomena. FEMLAB 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. Specifically, FEMLAB supports the integration of problems from different fields—Multiphysics.

Easy-to-Use

FEMLAB makes its considerable computational power available to users through an easy-to-use 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.

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.

Open and Extensible

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.

Solid Mathematical Foundation

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.

Compatibility

The software runs on top of MATLAB®, the industry standard tool for technical computing developed by The MathWorks Inc (Natick, MA). This gives you the freedom to combine modeling, simulation, and analysis with a host of numerous applications in engineering and science.

Leading-edge 3D Performance

It's true that 2D multiphysics modeling software can prove quite useful for certain classes of problems. Further, users are able to make appropriate assumptions and simplifications could also do a reasonable job of approximating a 3D problem with existing packages. But making these assumptions correctly and intelligently sometimes takes considerable knowledge, skill and experience. For instance, users might have to ask themselves, 'Where in the model should I take a 2D cross-section? How do I handle boundary conditions?'

With FEMLAB 2.0 users no longer need worry about such issues because they can create a full 3D model in a fraction of the time it would take them to make intelligent decisions about the simplifications and assumptions involved in setting up a 2D model.

The first step in a modeling session is to describe the physical system with the package's built-in CAD tools. To ease the development of geometries, FEMLAB 2.0 introduces 3D primitive objects while special commands and functions such as Extrude, Revolve, and Embed make it a breeze to build 3D objects from their 2D counterparts.

The software's powerful iterative solvers consume less memory than ever before and therefore can handle larger models with more tetrahedrons in the mesh, thereby leading to higher accuracy in the results. Finally, it's much easier to understand a system or analyze its performance if you can visualize various properties of the solution for different parameter values. The click of a button can, for instance, call up a color-coded slice plot, an isosurface plot, a tube plot or a 3D plot with cones or arrows. As before, the software can automatically create an animation that displays frames of a movie to illustrate dynamic effects. The Mac version of FEMLAB specifically supports the native Macintosh movie format QuickTime.

As noted earlier, the mesh generator and solvers all employ MATLAB as their computational engine. Thus users can create a model exclusively with the graphical user interface yet later export it as a series of command-line functions. In that way they can create instant documentation as well as access all of the sophisticated power of MATLAB to meet even the most demanding post-processing requirements.