The event: On 20th November 2024, I was invited by the students of BMS college of engineering, Bangalore, to introduce COMSOL to the first semester B-tech student of ECE branch. It was a part of the workshop Sensors Design 2.0, organised by BMSCE IEEE PES and Sensors Council, in collaboration with IEEE Sensors Council, IEEE Women in Sensors on 19th and 20th November 2024.
An opportunity for me to share COMSOL skills: COMSOL multiphysics is a powerful software that can be used for design, analysis, optimization processes. At the core it is solver for differential equations using finite element method. It has an extremely well-developed interface, allowing for well-organised workflow, it finds application in several fields in science and engineering. However, with a large number of modules and studies that comes with COMSOL, it can be quite daunting for beginners. That is where I, as a COMSOL user got the opportunity to help students get started with the module that I work with for my research.
While I work mostly on light-matter interaction and development of optical materials, I wanted the students to be able to simulate something that they can relate with, and not a topic that would be irrelvant to them. The phenomena like “the sky being blue in color” and “the sun being red in color during sunrise and sunset”, “Tyndall effect” are observed by everyone almost everyday. We know that these effects take place when light is scattered by a particle. Therefore I chose to teach the students how to do a “Scattering simulation” in COMSOL.
Since the students were beginners, I stuck to the 2D simulation. First I taught them how to launch a plane wave of particular wavelength using the port boundary condition in COMSOL. As the students were following along with me they could do it and were happy to see the plane wave propagating when i made them animate it. Then I taught to launch a plane wave in the scattered field formulation. Then I switched gears to teach them a bit on boundary mode analysis and launching a 1550nm light into an optical fiber. By the end of two and a half hour, when I was assured that they can now simulate on their own, I asked them to put a nanoparticle of 200nm radius and launch a plane wave on it in the scattered field formulation. With this simulation they could see that the when the wavelength of light is comparable to that of the nanoparticle, the light was scattered more, than the longer wavelengths. The students simulated an and realised for themselves this explanation which they had studied in their school textbooks.
The above pictures are some glimpses during the workshop session. At the end we took a group photo, and the organisers presented me with a gift.
I am really grateful to the organizers for inviting me as a resource person for the workshop. The above pictures are taken by the volunteers of the organizing team.
