COMSOL in the Academic Environment at USNA

Abstract : Academic usage of COMSOL for student use has only begun in the last five years at USNA. Student involvement comes in four types, course-wide usage, focused course related work, student projects and semester-long research projects. A summary of how COMSOL has been successfully used at USNA will be given, showing examples of student work, with topics ranging from acoustics, fluid dynamics pde solutions, mechanical engineering samples as well as electro-magnetics calculations. In each case, a brief description of the results difficulties and suggestions will be presented. Overall, using COMSOL in education needs to be addressed for the sake of education itself. How easily do students work with COMSOL? Is COMSOL a substitution for performing calculations in class? How well coupled are textbooks to examples using COMSOL? Are new approaches to teaching PDE's available due to access to solvers, such as COMSOL? Do simplistic models in COMSOL translate to better learning?