COMSOL Desktop® Updates

For all COMSOL Multiphysics® software users, version 5.6 introduces a number of Graphics window enhancements, including interactive clipping functionality and context menus. Read more about these and other COMSOL Desktop® updates below.

Graphics Window Improvements

The Graphics window context menu, introduced for physics in COMSOL Multiphysics® version 5.5, now supports many more options, including definitions, geometry, mesh, materials, and multiphysics. By right-clicking and choosing from a context menu, this method simplifies selections throughout the modeling workflow. The Graphics toolbar has new options for YX, ZY, or ZX views. In addition, you can control whether the x-axis, y-axis, or z-axis should be used as the vertical axis in the default 3D view. There is a new option in the Preferences window for making the Graphics window toolbar buttons larger, which can be useful for high-resolution monitors, and another for changing the COMSOL Desktop® color theme.

The Graphics window in COMSOL Multiphysics version 5.6 showing a bracket model with a context menu opened and the Boundary Point Probe option highlighted.
Right-clicking in the Graphics window presents a menu for adding features, such as probes, to a selection. Shown here in the Multistudy Bracket Optimization model.

Interactive Clipping

To make it easier to select edges, boundaries, and domains that are located inside a surrounding object, you can now use interactive clipping. Add planes, boxes, cylinders, and spheres to select which parts of a geometry are shown. The interactive clipping functionality works throughout the Model Builder and is available from a menu button in the Graphics toolbar. When you click the toolbar button, by default, a Clip Plane node is added to the View node, with settings that you can adjust in a Settings window or interactively in the Graphics window. Multiple clip planes may be added and used concurrently.

A gray induction motor model with the inside exposed at the top, by way of clipping.
Clip plane in a model of an induction motor. The gizmo, visible at the center, allows for interactive translation and rotation of the clip plane in order to visualize and select domains and boundaries inside of an object.