The objective of the workshop is to describe experiences with the use of COMSOL in the Masters Program in Mechanical Engineering at Rensselaer-Hartford. Many of our students are engineers working in the aerospace industry (Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, Hamilton Standard, Kaman and the like) and have interest in aerospace industry problems while pursuing their degree in Mechanical Engineering. COMSOL Multiphysics is a recently developed finite elelment computer program that incorporates many important advances in numerical mathematics and computer science made over the past 30 years into a unified, easy to use platform. At Rensselaer-Hartford we have made increasing use of the software over the last three years by applying it to the solution of a wide variety of engineering problems, many of them closely connected to aerospace industry needs. The workshop will demonstrate the applicability of the software first by reviewing in detail a number of selected programs that have been developed at Rensselaer over the past couple of years. Then, selected examples from COMSOL's own Model Library will be examined. Workshop participants will be asked to experiment with the COMSOL system by creating variants of the programs examined. Emphasis throughout will be on implementation of proven, successful modeling practices and on verification and validation of the models developed.

I thank CINVESTAV-Saltillo for making possible for me to present this material at the Center.