Check it Out: Read COMSOL News, Meet Smart People

By Anthony J. Lockwood

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

A college English professor, Burness was my best teacher ever. A hop-around-the-room and ham-up-the-bard sort of guy. Some 25 years after college, we chanced to meet in a diner and became fast friends. He had not a clue about the stuff I write about. But, true to form, he asked me if I was learning things. When I said every second, he jumped up and cried: “Learning. That’s what life is about. Hang out with, listen to, and read the works of people smarter than you. Reading is a conversation with someone important you can learn from …” He ranted on like that for a good 10 minutes. Scared the snot out a few old ladies while he was at it. Great guy.

“People smarter than I” is my mantra when I attend the annual COMSOL Multiphysics Users Conference or, for that matter, when I meet people like you. See, in most of the technical sessions, my grasp of the subject is just beyond my reach. Still, I learn a lot. And, quite frankly, it’s awesome listening to smart people as they explain and demonstrate how they use multiphysics simulations to bring new products to the market and new technologies to engineers at a faster pace and at less cost than ever before.

The 2012 worldwide COMSOL users conference series begins in Boston in just a few weeks. But you don’t have to wait to learn what I mean about people smarter than I at the conference. You can read some of what they had to say last time right now. The annual COMSOL News is now available without registration or cost (unless you want a hard copy) right now from the link over there.

This 72-page e-zine has 25 articles written by engineers,  researchers, and scientists at such leading organizations as Fiat Research Center, Siemens Corporate Technology, Shell Global Solutions UK, Toyota Research Institute of North America, and Yale. It has six sections: chemical,  electrical, fluid flow, heat transfer, mechanical, and multiphysics analysis. Among the keywords that might interest you are corrosion detection, electrical spinal cord stimulation therapy, hybrid vehicles, piezoelectric energy harvesting, simulating on clusters, surface plasmons, and transformer design. A guest editorial by an engineer with DuPunt provides insightful tips on how to better leverage mathematical modeling.

The articles in COMSOL News are derived from the technical presentations at last year’s COMSOL conferences in Boston and around the world. Many of the articles have a link at the end so that you can download the full technical paper. Registration is required here, but it gains you full access to the COMSOL website where you can participate in the discussion community,  access the huge COMSOL technical library, and get at other goodies.

The theme for this edition of COMSOL News is “Multiphysics means breakthroughs and productivity.” I have no quibble with that. Each article hits one or both of those points. But, you know, COMSOL News is so much more than that. COMSOL News is the work of a lot of people a lot smarter than I and maybe you too. Neither of us may be designing the next great thing, but we can say that we learned about it from the smart guy who is. Hit the link over there, read COMSOL News. Don’t miss this one.

Thanks,  Pal.—Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood
Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

Read COMSOL News,  Meet Smart People