COMSOL license cost-sharing program now available to CoE research groups

The College of Engineering cost shares a shared pool of COMSOL Multiphysics licenses for research use, administered by CAEN.  Since the COMSOL research license pool is NOT a site license, a cost-sharing program has been set up, meaning Engineering faculty and their research groups which heavily use the licenses are charged for the portion of their usage:

  • Research groups are charged $1,000 for each 2,500 hours of COMSOL shared research license usage within a calendar year, beginning on March 1.
  • U-M shortcodes are used to pay for the program, and must include a College of Engineering department ID.
  • The above rate may be adjusted annually based on usage logs that are reviewed for accumulated consumption of each research group enrolled in the program.
  • Groups that use the COMSOL shared research licenses for fewer than 2,500 hours per year are not charged for their usage.

The pool of licenses currently includes a limited number of copies of COMSOL Multiphysics, and a smaller number of each of the following add-on modules:

  • AC/DC 
  • Acoustics 
  • Batteries & Fuel Cells 
  • CAD Import 
  • CFD
  • Chemical Reaction Engineering 
  • ECAD Import
  • Heat Transfer 
  • LiveLink for Excel
  • LiveLink for Inventor
  • LiveLink for MATLAB
  • LiveLink for SOLIDWORKS
  • MEMS
  • Microfluidics
  • Molecular Flow
  • Multibody Dynamics
  • Nonlinear Structural Materials
  • Optimization
  • Particle Tracing
  • Pipe Flow
  • Plasma
  • Ray Optics
  • RF
  • Semiconductor
  • Structural Mechanics
  • Subsurface Flow
  • Wave Optics

There is no requirement to participate in the program, as research groups may choose to purchase separate licenses of COMSOL Multiphysics, and include only the add-on modules they need. In addition, since there are not enough licenses to be used for parallel computing on research computing clusters, groups with this requirement will need to purchase separate licenses for that purpose. CAEN can assist research groups with these types of purchases, but CAEN will not manage additional license servers for these purposes.

How to Enroll

To enroll in the program, faculty researchers must provide a U-M shortcode and a list of computer hostnames that will use the licenses by filling out the College of Engineering COMSOL Research License Cost-Sharing Program request form.

Further Help

COMSOL usage reports based on the fiscal year use data are available upon request. In order to verify your group’s usage, please send the full hostnames of the computers in your research lab. All other questions about the COMSOL research license cost-sharing program may also be sent to [email protected].