Academic usage of COMSOL for student use has only begun in the last five years at USNA. Student involvement comes in four types, course-wide usage, focused course related work, student projects and semester-long research projects. A summary of how COMSOL has been successfully used at USNA will be given, showing examples of student work, with topics ranging from acoustics, fluid dynamics, pde so...

We show how the software Comsol Multiphysics can be used to solve PDE-constrained optimal control problems. We give a general formulation for such kind of problems and derive the adjoint equation and optimality system. Then these preliminaries are specified for the stationary Navier-Stokes equations with distributed and boundary control. The main steps to define and solve a PDE with Comsol Mult...

Most models of biological pattern formation are simulated on continuous domains even though cells are discrete objects that provide internal boundaries to the diffusion of regulatory components. In our previous papers on simulating organogenesis in COMSOL (Germann et al COMSOL Conf Procedings 2011; Menshykau and Iber, COMSOL Conf Proceedings 2012) we discussed methods to efficiently solve signa...

The graphical user interface (GUI) of COMSOL Multiphysics offers an effective environment to get started solving problems. For reproducibility of the results, it is often desirable to explore the script-based modeling capabilities of COMSOL with MATLAB. There are also potential benefits of running COMSOL in parallel, specifically by running several computational threads in shared-memory paralle...

This research effort is focused on the development of large angle, out-of-plane bimorph MEMS micromirrors fabricated in the PolyMUMPs foundry process. Based on design constraints of the PolyMUMPs process, current designs fabricated do not meet the requirements to enable large angle optical steering. Through Comsol modeling and simulation, several post-processing techniques were discovered that ...