Page 14 - Process Modelling and Simulation With Finite Element Methods

INTRODUCTION TO FEMLAB

W.B.J. ZIMMERMAN
Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Sheffield,
Newcastle Street, Sheffield S1 3JD United Kingdom

E-mail: w.zimmerman @she$ac.uk

FEMLAB is a relatively recent development in the MATLAB sphere. Perhaps a good
fraction of the readers of this book were attracted by the title and the dust jacket
description, so they might have little exposure to FEMLAB previously. To them, I would
heartily recommend attending a FEMLAB seminar on their recurring academic
roadshows. The experience of seeing FEMLAB in action is more illustrative than the
printed word and screen captures shown here. This Introduction provides an overview of
why I wrote the book and developed an intensive training module for FEMLAB
modeling of chemical engineering applications - the unique features of FEMLAB that
the reader will want to assess for her own modeling objectives. The FEMLAB User’s
Guide (available for download from the COMSOL web site) does a better job of
familiarizing the reader with “What is FEMLAB?’ than the brief introduction in this
chapter to the FEMLAB graphical user interface (GUI). The point of the introduction to
FEMLAB here is to describe how completely determined models are set up in FEMLAB,
after which the methodology can be used in subsequent chapters without ambiguity.
Nevertheless, I hope that this chapter whets your appetite for the cornucopia of modeling
tools, along with an intellectual framework for using FEMLAB for modeling, that is
described in this book.

0.1 Overview of the Book

Chapters 1-4 were taken as the text for the first intensive module “Chemical
Engineering Modelling with FEMLAB .” These chapters represent a personal
odyssey with FEMLAB. It was not originally my intention to write a book about
FEMLAB. For a long term project that I am still undertaking, I need a PDE
engine that is readily customizable to additional terms and heterogeneous
domains. Once I decided that FEMLAB could fill the bill, I needed to become
an expert on it. One nefarious way of doing that is to declare a course on it, rope
graduate students and other interested external parties into attending, and then
study like mad to produce a coherent set of lectures and computer laboratories. I
already had several templates for this, having taught undergraduate and
postgraduate modules on numerical analysis, modeling, and simulation. So I
adapted the storyline of those modules with FEMLAB models. Chapter One is
the product of this adaptation. Chapter Two is an obvious outgrowth of my prior
use of the PDE toolbox of MATLAB and a necessary explanation of finite
element methods. Chapters 3-7 were far more deliberate attempts to exploit the

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