COMSOL Desktop® Updates
For all COMSOL Multiphysics® software users, version 5.6 introduces a number of Graphics window enhancements, including interactive clipping functionality and context menus. Read more about these and other COMSOL Desktop® updates below.
Graphics Window Improvements
The Graphics window context menu, introduced for physics in COMSOL Multiphysics® version 5.5, now supports many more options, including definitions, geometry, mesh, materials, and multiphysics. By right-clicking and choosing from a context menu, this method simplifies selections throughout the modeling workflow. The Graphics toolbar has new options for YX, ZY, or ZX views. In addition, you can control whether the x-axis, y-axis, or z-axis should be used as the vertical axis in the default 3D view. There is a new option in the Preferences window for making the Graphics window toolbar buttons larger, which can be useful for high-resolution monitors, and another for changing the COMSOL Desktop® color theme.

Interactive Clipping
To make it easier to select edges, boundaries, and domains that are located inside a surrounding object, you can now use interactive clipping. Add planes, boxes, cylinders, and spheres to select which parts of a geometry are shown. The interactive clipping functionality works throughout the Model Builder and is available from a menu button in the Graphics toolbar. When you click the toolbar button, by default, a Clip Plane node is added to the View node, with settings that you can adjust in a Settings window or interactively in the Graphics window. Multiple clip planes may be added and used concurrently.

Boundary Layer Meshing on Faces
You can now create a boundary layer mesh for faces in 3D. With this, you can create swept meshes with boundary layer elements using the boundary layer mesh face as the input to your swept mesh.

Models that demonstrate this functionality:
- diesel_particulate_filter
- inline_induction_heater
- pipe_elbow
- pipe_elbow_erosion
- serpentine_flow_field
- steam_reformer
Element Quality Measure for Curved Elements
When you use a nonlinear geometry shape function, the mesh elements are curved to fit the geometry. Use the new Curved skewness quality measure, in the Statistics window or a Mesh plot, to detect potential problems induced by the curving of the elements.

More Editing and Repairing Tools for Imported Meshes
New tools are available for imported meshes that allow you to do the following:
- Intersect a 3D surface mesh with a plane, or a 2D mesh with a line
- Remesh a surface mesh by using the Free Triangular or Free Quad operation
- Create vertices and partition faces by selecting mesh vertices and edges in the Graphics window


Mesh resulting from the intersect and delete operations (left) and the same part remeshed using the Free Triangular
operation (right), preparing it for subsequent modeling.
Create Meshes from Partition Datasets
Using the Import operation, you can now import a mesh with the mesh data from a Partition dataset.