Pressure vessels are designed to confine liquids or gases. These containers are used in nuclear plants, throughout the chemical and petroleum industries, and even as water heaters in homes. In principle, the vessels’ internal pressure is much higher (or sometimes lower) than the ambient pressure, so the vessels must be carefully designed, as failure can result in severe damage. Today, we’ll show you how to use the Application Builder in COMSOL Multiphysics to create an efficient and accurate design workflow.

When performing structural mechanics analyses, you will inevitably encounter the concept of geometric nonlinearity. In this blog post, we discuss what is meant by geometric nonlinearity and when you should take this effect into consideration.

When an earthquake strikes, the force from its seismic waves can weaken the stability of buildings. By implementing seismic control measures, designers can enhance the flexibility of such structures as well as strengthen their safety levels. See how one research team used COMSOL Multiphysics to study the impact of base isolation systems and explore approaches to optimizing their performance.

Nonlinear elastic materials present nonlinear stress-strain relationships even at infinitesimal strains — as opposed to hyperelastic materials, where stress-strain curves become significantly nonlinear at moderate to large strains. Important materials of this class are Ramberg-Osgood for modeling metals and other ductile materials and nonlinear soils models, such as the Duncan-Chang model.

The Membrane interface has undergone a number of changes with the release of COMSOL Multiphysics version 5.0. This includes a restructured menu, new feature nodes, improvements to the Linear Elastic Material model, and support for the Hyperelastic Material model. You might remember the Nonlinear Structural Materials model Inflation of a Spherical Rubber Balloon. We have now rebuilt it using the Membrane interface. I will discuss these changes and the new model in today’s blog post.

Arteries are designed to carry blood containing oxygen and nutrients from the heart to other areas of the body. Studying this biological soft tissue from a mechanical standpoint requires a reliable model that can fully describe the arteries’ anisotropic nonlinear response. Our tutorial of arterial wall mechanics illustrates such a design.

Piezoelectric valves are opened and closed by stacked piezoelectric actuators that are positioned above a seal. By applying a voltage to the stacked piezoelectric actuator, it can be made to expand or contract and the resulting deformation is used to open and close the valve. In this blog post, we feature a tutorial model of a stacked piezoelectric actuator in a pneumatic valve, new with COMSOL Multiphysics version 5.1.

Commonly used in the automotive industry, snap hooks are a type of fastener that involve the insertion of a hook into a slot. When designing snap hooks, it is important to analyze the forces required for the insertion of the hook as well as its removal. We can address this through simulation.

We have introduced a new interface for simulating piezoelectric devices in version 5.0 of the COMSOL Multiphysics simulation software. This interface aims to achieve several things. In this blog post, I will explain what these things are and how you can use them.

Today, we will introduce the concept of residual stresses in structural mechanics and find out how to compute them by taking the example of a deep metal drawing process. First, we will explain how they can be computed and interpreted in a bending beam example with or without work hardening. Then, we will introduce a sheet metal forming model.