LiveLink™ for AutoCAD® enables modeling using 3D designs synchronized from the AutoCAD® CAD software. The included LiveLink™ interface builds on an associative transfer of the geometry from the CAD program to the COMSOL model.

Through the LiveLink interface, you can modify the geometry in the CAD program by sending the name and value of a dimension or parameter to AutoCAD. There the geometry is updated and regenerated, before finally being transferred back to COMSOL Multiphysics. The associative transfer assures that all your settings on the geometry are retained, just as they were before the modification.

If you rather use file import to get your designs into COMSOL Multiphysics, the product also supports import of the most common 3D CAD file formats: ACIS®, AutoCAD®, IGES, Inventor®, NX®, Parasolid®, PTC Creo Parametric™, PTC Pro/ENGINEER®, SOLIDWORKS®, and STEP. In addition, support for CATIA® V5 is available as a separate add-on. To exchange data with CAD packages, you can export your geometry to the ACIS®, IGES, Parasolid®, and STEP file formats.

Finally, the product provides a dedicated geometric kernel, the CAD kernel, and a wide range of tools for you to prepare an imported 3D design for meshing and analysis. You can interactively search for and remove geometric features, for example, fillets, holes, slivers, small faces, and short edges. You can also modify objects by detaching a portion to form an additional computational domain, or by creating a fluid domain for computation, in case the CAD design only includes the solid parts.