New Geometry and Mesh Functionality

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A Partition Faces operation is now available in 3D geometries for partitioning faces using curve segments between vertices, extended edges, or a work plane.

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There is improved interactive drawing for 2D geometries, including coordinate display and snapping points indicated by a red circle. You can now also snap to the geometry for side midpoints and centerpoints of other geometry objects.

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A list is now available for geometry features in a plane geometry in a work plane. The selections will appear as selections for use within the 3D geometry sequence. In the node’s settings, you can choose to show selection from the plane geometry in the physics (or in instances for geometry parts).

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The geometry repair tolerance can now be specified as automatic, relative, or absolute.

Meshing Functionality

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For general unstructured meshing, several improvements are available:

In the section, the list now has the options , , and . Automatic is the default in new models and means that COMSOL Multiphysics tries to determine the best algorithm to use for each domain. Delaunay is a more efficient implementation of the meshing algorithm that was introduced in version 5.2 (and was then called the alternative version). Delaunay (legacy version) is the algorithm used in earlier COMSOL versions. If you open an old model, it will use the legacy version by default.

In a new section, , you can control how much effort COMSOL Multiphysics will put into optimizing element quality and tune the optimization for certain situations. The setting can be (the default), which makes basic optimizations aiming at a minimal element quality of 0.2; , which makes more optimization and aims at a minimal element quality of 0.35; or , which attempts all available optimization operations. If the quality of the surface mesh is low (typically due to small details or narrow corners in the geometry), the high setting can take a significant amount of time.

If your geometry has fillets or other curved regions with a relatively coarse mesh, and you solve with a geometry shape order higher than one, you can select the Avoid inverted curved elements check box. This makes the optimization try to reduce the number of element that invert when they are curved but may also result in longer meshing times and often a slightly higher number of elements and lower element quality.

If your computation is sensitive to too large mesh elements, you can select the check box. For each element, there is a desired element size h, and if the element is larger than that, the COMSOL Multiphysics software tries to make it smaller. The cost for this operation is meshing time and element quality. If you evaluate the maximum of h on a sufficiently large mesh of uniform size, this value is typically decreased by 10 percent when this option is selected.

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For an explicit distribution of elements option in the node in meshing sequences, you can now choose to reverse the direction.

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The quality and robustness of the free quad mesh algorithm has been improved for circle-shaped domains in 2D and planar circle-shaped faces in 3D.

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In the node’s window, the number of mesh vertices are now displayed.

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Progress information is now available during a mesh copy operation.