Radioactive materials have a long half-life, so they must be stored safely — usually in steel drums. These drums are then stored in confinement systems, which are designed with safety in mind (so that they can resist, for instance, a fire event exceeding two hours). Sogin, the state-owned company responsible for the Italian nuclear sites decommissioning and radioactive waste management, evaluated the fire resistance of a confinement system overpack using the COMSOL Multiphysics® software.

Heart failure is a global health concern, affecting millions of people and keeping them from their everyday lives. But what if there was a device that could keep patients’ hearts pumping and even improve their quality of life? In his keynote presentation at the COMSOL Conference 2018 Boston, Freddy Hansen from Abbott Laboratories discussed a heart pump that could do just that. If you missed his talk, you can watch a recording of the video and read a summary below.

Sir Horace Lamb was a British applied mathematician and professor who wrote several textbooks that became fundamental in physics. Among them is a comprehensive text that was considered the standard for hydrodynamics for many years. His work in this subject resulted in the Lamb vector, the Lamb-Oseen vortex, and Lamb surfaces. He also authored works on sound, statistics, and mechanics.

“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure ‘science.’” — Edwin Hubble Imagine if the entire universe consisted of the Milky Way galaxy alone. Most scientists thought this was the case before astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered other galaxies. Considered the founder of extragalactic astronomy, Hubble was one of the leading 20th-century figures in observational cosmology and provided evidence that the universe expands at a constant rate.

During routine exams, eye care professionals look for common refractive errors like nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. As patients age, doctors also look for presbyopia, a loss of the accommodative amplitude that results long-term in a complete loss of the near vision. The visual accommodation process is complex, and useful eye properties needed to improve diagnosis and presbyopia treatment are difficult to obtain. To address the problem of measuring the refractive index of the lens, researchers developed a reverse engineering technique […]

Émilie du Châtelet was a French physicist, natural philosopher, and mathematician who contributed to our understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Her translation of Sir Isaac Newton’s book the Principia is considered the standard version in French today. In addition to translating this work, she included her own commentary, adding a conservation law for total energy that emphasizes the role of kinetic energy. She is also famous for her masterful textbook, Foundations of Physics, which takes a philosophical approach to the sciences.

When modeling acoustic devices, it’s often enough to account for linear propagation alone, even though nonlinearities are always present. However, when the signaling amplitude reaches high levels in a design, nonlinear effects become important. Engineers can include nonlinear effects in simulations by taking advantage of the Nonlinear Acoustics (Westervelt) feature in the COMSOL Multiphysics® software, as demonstrated by an exponential horn example.

Plastic floating at sea often winds up in debris-filled gyres, commonly known as garbage patches. These patches of plastic circulating in the ocean pose a danger to wildlife and are slowly entering the food chain. One project aims to remove this debris with floating boom technology, which is often used to contain oil spills.

In the 1615 novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, the titular character, who fantasizes about being a medieval knight, mistakes windmills for giants and charges at them, only to get his lance stuck in one of the sails. While modern wind turbine blades don’t have to withstand that kind of pointed force, it’s important to perform stress and modal analyses of blade designs to account for various — and more realistic — structural and environmental loads.

Starting with photography, William D. Coolidge had a lifelong interest in light and images. His pursuits in electrical engineering drove him to develop the incandescent light bulb, using ductile tungsten as the wire filament. This tungsten method lit the way for further developments in X-ray and radiology technology, helping medical professionals more accurately diagnose their patients.