25. – 26. 5., Hotel Galant, Lednice
The COMSOL Multiphysics conference was held this year for the seventh time. This meeting connecting the academic and industrial spheres took place from Thursday 25th to Friday 26th May in the beautiful surroundings of Hotel Galant in Lednice. After several years affected by the pandemic, we recorded a record number of visitors. In total, 66 participants took part in the conference, which is 6 more than in the record year 2019. In addition, we kept the option of online viewing, which was used by another 22 participants. This allowed us to expand the reach of the conference and connect experts from different countries and areas.
Wednesday, preceding the main program, was devoted to consultations of our customers' models. A new distance record was achieved here. We welcomed a customer all the way from Norway, whose model we consulted with pleasure. This experience once again showed us that simulations are a universal language regardless of the country of operation or the physics modeled.
Wednesday's preparation day stretched into the early hours of the morning, with participants enthusiastically discussing their projects and sharing their experiences.
The Thursday morning program focused on optics and brought several interesting lectures. The special guest was Linus Andersson from the COMSOL Office in Sweden. Linus presented the high-frequency RF and Wave Optics modules, supplemented by the Ray Optics Module. The program before lunch also included a lecture on structural-thermal-optical (STOP) simulations, which attracted the attention of many participants and sparked a long discussion.
After lunch, we took over the program and presented detailed demonstrations of electromagnetic heating simulations of a flow heater and a lecture on modeling particle trajectories. The evening program then took place in the pleasant atmosphere of the wine cellar, where we had fun until the early hours.
The Friday morning program was enriched by the lectures of our users, who presented a wide range of projects. Simulations of nonlinear elasticity and strength with hysteresis were presented, a model of a scanning electron microscope for teaching students, and three workplaces presented interesting CFD simulations – unsteady flow in the heart, flow and interaction with the wall in the real geometry of a hyperelastic artery, and last but not least, LES simulations. The topics of release of substances through the membrane, a very complex model of the interaction of the laser beam with the material, modeling of the spin system of the NV center appeared in other contributions, an interesting contribution showed the possibilities and problems in calculations in the Metacenter, and the section ended with the first experiences of connecting COMSOL Multiphysics with a geochemical simulator.
After lunch, the program focused on artificial intelligence, which, by the way, also writes this report. Colleague Anička Tocháčková, for example, presented the new MATLAB Medical Imaging Toolbox, which can semi-automatically segment 3D images. One of the images of the lungs was subsequently printed on a 3D printer, and Matouš Lorenc, in a follow-up post, imported the segmented geometry into COMSOL Multiphysics, where a computer simulation can be performed on the real geometry.
But that was the end of the whole meeting, after which the participants from different corners of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and actually the whole world went home. We believe they enjoyed the conference as much as we did and we look forward to the next meeting. The next edition will take place in 2024, again at the end of May, and we hope to meet again.