After setting up a COMSOL model that includes the heat flux from the laser and the ring heater, I've made the model solve over time manually by performing the solution process over a loop in MATLAB.

This allows for the future insertion of the PID controller object in the solving process, and the dynamic manipulation of the applied heat loads.

The following is an automatically generated plot of defocus effects as a function of time at 1 beam radius (54 mm), included in the program, with only the ring heater turned on in a top-hat emission configuration and the total power being 5 watts.

The linear projection values needed to calculate the defocus effect are extracted directly from COMSOL, with no output files required through the use of the mphinterp command.

The behavior appears to be physical and is of the correct order of magnitude.

I've also attached the code that produced it for verification. (It requires COMSOL+Matlab to run.)

% function out = model
%
% ITMPlusRing.m
%
% Model exported on Jun 24 2013, 16:24 by COMSOL 4.3.0.151.

deltat = 600;
totalt = 3600*24;
t = [0:deltat:totalt];
omega = 54/1000;