Sunday, July 13, 2014
By:
Each week seems to pass faster than the one before. It is already week 7, and I am starting to wind down with my research.
This week I spent most of my time trying to couple electrostatics physics with a current running across the transistor. I am having some frustrations with COMSOL; the biggest two being not having the enough iterations for a simulation and not having an image displayed after a study ran. For the iteration problem, I believe my boundary conditions are messing up. When I couple the two physics modules together the software says it runs out of iterations and can not continue the process. When I run the two modules separately however, there is no error. I think when I apply the electrostatics to the electrical circuit a boundary condition is off, leading to a result going to infinity and causing my simulation to run out of memory. Next, the problem of the missing image has been plaguing my work. From the 1D plot COMSOL tells me data has been taken on the line prescribed by me, but when I go to the 3-D view the image is missing parts so I don't get a good visualization of what is going on. I have searched forum to forum seeking an answer to my problem and I haven’t found one yet. I have a couple of days before I have to seriously worry about not having an image, but I would like to get a good visual representation to display for the final presentation. Hopefully, I will solve both problems before next week, and include them in my slideshow.
I spent most of my time near the water this weekend. A group of us went down to Georgetown for the day and rented kayaks on the Potomac. It was a gorgeous day; the sun was beating down from overhead with a few clouds giving a nice relief of shade. We paddled around Jefferson Island and then as far down the Potomac we could go, stopping for a little bit on a sandbar to rest and get our feet muddy. After spending the day out on the river we decided to shower and return to the riverfront for dinner. The rest of the night was spent watching the yachts on the dock and enjoying the summer night air brushing our faces. This week was a fairly relaxed week. I am sure the one that will follow will start picking up as we get closer to presentation time, and the end of the summer. It’s been a fun time so far and I hope to keep that going for the next 3 weeks.
Benjamin Perez