Abstract
Users of COMSOL Multiphysics at version 3.5a and earlier have enjoyed
many features that have provided not only a good user experience at
the GUI interface, but also the capability to solve many classes of
problems in a consistent manner with the physics being simulated. With
the new release version 4.0 and later (4+) of COMSOL, the user is
provided a dramatic new interface from which to interact, and many new
features ``under the hood'' for solving problems more efficiently and with even
greater accuracy and consistency than before. This paper will explore
several of these new version 4+ features for the conjugate heat
transfer class of problems. Our environment is challenging in that we
demand high-quality solutions for nuclear-reactor systems and the
models tend to become large and difficult to solve. Areas
investigated include turbulence modeling, distributed parallel
processing, solver scaling, and opengl graphics issues in a Linux
computing environment.
