Analyzing Mechanical Systems and Designs

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

Today’s Check it Out link takes you to COMSOL’s “Analyzing Mechanical Systems and Designs” showcase. This is a very well done example of how to present a lot of diverse but related technical content on the web. It’s someplace where you can easily lose track of time. Here’s a quick tour.

The hero of this eight-part collection of materials is, of course, COMSOL Multiphysics and a number of its extension modules. Yes, each topic area ends with a link to a specific COMSOL product or two, and COMSOL does the demos. But that should not deter you if your loyalties lie with another solution. Little of this is marketing fluff. The information and the analyses studied should intrigue, inform and even entertain any practitioner of mechanical design and optimization as well as physics fans.

The presentation order is Mechanical Analysis, Structural Analysis, Nonlinear Materials, Thermal Stresses and Deformation, Acoustics, Multibody Dynamics, Fatigue and CAD Integration & Optimization. The general presentation has a couple of brief paragraphs on an analysis type’s physics phenomena intentions and an outline of a tricky issue or an achievable result.

Each topic offers a small set of resources. All have at least one downloadable PDF of a highly technical paper. Four topics have an eight- or nine-minute video demo, and all have some terrific images, some of which are animated. Navigational tools across the top include a menu stack that lists the topics you can jump to as well as a button to skip to the next topic. Colored backgrounds separate discussions from one another and make everything easier on the eyes.

After the table of contents, the showcase opens with a nearly 3-minute video, “Mechanical Analysis: The Modern Start of the Product Life Cycle.” This serves as the showcase’s formal forward and as a quick introduction the COMSOL Multiphysics product line-up. The latter includes some 40 products, incorporating about 30 physics-specific analysis modules ranging from mechanical analysis to plasma and chemical reactions to CFD. It also contains associative CAD integrations and general-purpose modules like a materials library, particle tracing and optimization.

The image up there in the HTML version of this message was drawn from the Fatigue discussion, so we’ll use that as our first section sample. No video or animated GIF here, but there are two PDFs. The first is a 32-page document titled “Energy-Based Thermal Fatigue Prediction in a Ball Grid Array.” It brings you step by step through an analysis of the solder joint in a microelectronic component subject to repetitive thermal cycling. The second paper, which contains the image above, examines Findley fatigue criterion during a fatigue analysis of a wheel rim.

A highlight of the Acoustics discussion is a nine-minute video demo on analyzing the acoustic behavior of a loudspeaker with an emphasis on the loudspeaker’s electromagnetic and structural mechanical characteristics. This section has a single, two-page PDF called “Sonar Dome Vibration Analysis” that originally appeared in COMSOL News, the company’s yearly compendium of the best papers from its annual global user conferences.

That article in the Acoustics unit illustrates a significant feature of this showcase: COMSOL took the time to pull in some pretty hard-core yet digestible technical data from across its extensive knowledge base to make this multimedia presentation comprehensive. This is the real reason why you can spend a lot of quality time in this collection of materials on analyzing mechanical systems and designs.

So, hit today’s Check It Out link to access COMSOL’s “Analyzing Mechanical Systems and Designs” showcase. No registration is required. All you need is to be prepared to look up and notice it has gotten late.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Go here to enter the COMSOL Analyzing Mechanical Systems and Designs showcase.