Known Issues for External Materials

Being new functionality, the external materials framework suffers from a few known issues which may affect usability in some cases:

•	There is no unit support: Inputs are passed to the external function in the model’s base unit system and outputs are interpreted in the same system.

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Shared libraries containing external material functions are loaded the first time they are used and never reloaded. To avoid having to repeatedly restart COMSOL Multiphysics while developing an external material function, you can simply change the name of the linked library each time you make a change to it.

•	The way the external functions are called is not fault tolerant in any way. This means that reading or writing outside allocated memory in an external function will typically make the COMSOL Desktop crash. Take care.