COMSOL Multiphysics in action: Courtesy Metelli SpA (Cologne, Italy)

By Joe McEntee, group editor, in Boston

I’ve been on something of an east-coast road trip this past week – Washington DC, Philadelphia, Boston and several points inbetween.

Just outside Boston, in the high-tech corridor in and around Burlington, Massachusetts, I spent a morning at the North American headquarters of COMSOL, a firm that develops the COMSOL Multiphysics software platform for the modelling and simulation of all manner of physics-based systems.

Regular readers of physicsworld.com will doubtless be familiar with COMSOL Multiphysics and its range of scientific applications. If you’re not, you can get up to speed easily enough by checking out COMSOL’s series of popular tutorial webinars over on the multimedia channel.

Webinars aside, COMSOL is also a player in the live-events business. Planning for the company’s sixth annual user conference in Boston (7–9 October 2010) is well advanced, according to Bernt Nilsson, COMSOL’s senior vice-president of marketing.

“The conference is a great way to create community – to get COMSOL Multiphysics users together so that they can share ideas and learn from others about the software tools used to solve physics problems,” Nilsson told me.

He described the user conference as “a smorgasbord of different applications”, spanning acoustics, computational fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, batteries and fuel cells, and many other areas of physics.

For the record, last year’s conference in Boston pulled in 300 delegates from 11 countries with a programme comprising more than 130 user presentations and a supporting schedule of Multiphysics courses and tutorial sessions.

Right now, scientists and engineers are being invited to submit abstracts describing projects in which COMSOL Multiphysics has played a key role. If your submission gets accepted, you’ll be invited to present your work at the conference and submit a paper or poster for the CD version of the proceedings (more than 100,000 of which are distributed to COMSOL’s worldwide contacts).

Full guidelines on submitting an abstract can be found on the COMSOL Conference website.

P.S. Don’t miss the next instalment in COMSOL’s webinar series, “Plasma modelling with COMSOL Multiphysics”, which is scheduled for Thursday 17 June at 10.00 a.m. BST on physicsworld.com. Click here to register.