Exploiting New Features of COMSOL Version 4 on Conjugate Heat Transfer Problems

Users of COMSOL Multiphysics at version 3.5a and earlier have enjoyed many features that have provided not only a good user experience at the GUI interface, but also the capability to solve many classes of problems in a consistent manner with the physics being simulated. With the new release version 4.0 and later (4+) of COMSOL, the user is provided a dramatic new interface from which to interact, and many new features ``under the hood'' for solving problems more efficiently and with even greater accuracy and consistency than before. This paper will explore several of these new version 4+ features for the conjugate heat transfer class of problems. Our environment is challenging in that we demand high-quality solutions for nuclear-reactor systems and the models tend to become large and difficult to solve. Areas investigated include turbulence modeling, distributed parallel processing, solver scaling, and opengl graphics issues in a Linux computing environment.