Ph.D. student Fateme Esmailie, advised by mechanical engineering professor Tim Ameel and associate professor Mathieu Francoeur, won the top poster award earlier this month at the COMSOL Conference 2018 Boston. Nearly 150 users of the COMSOL Multiphysics® software and COMSOL Server™ who are simulation engineers and researchers presented papers and posters in a variety of topics. She is a member of the Microscale Thermal Fluids Lab.

Pictured COMSOL CEO Svante Littmarck with the 2018 Best Paper and Poster winners. From left to right: Fateme Esmailie, Tressa Marquardt, Alexander Eden, Aroba Saleem, and Shomik Verma.

Esmailie’s poster is entitled: “A Heat Transfer Analysis of the Cochlea During Magnetically Guided Cochlear Implant Surgery”

Worldwide, there are approximately 450,000 cochlea implant users. Options for inserting these implants are not without risk, including intracochlear physical trauma. New techniques employ magnetically guided, robot-assisted insertion, which reduces the risk of intracochlear physical trauma. However, this method can introduce a new risk: thermal trauma in the magnetic detachment phase. Along with fellow researchers Francoeur and Ameel, Esmailie used COMSOL Multiphysics to study heat transfer within the cochlea and determine the best conditions for magnet removal.

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