Hello peeps!
I was wondering if MATLAB can be helpful for Mechanical Engineers? I am in my junior year and was going to take MATLAB tutorials. So, I thought some professional opinions should be taken first.

 

Hi, I took few MATLAB classes in college, and became a teaching assistant for the MATLAB class in graduate school. To be fair to say, it depends on your specialty and interests; it would be extremely helpful if you are leaning towards testing and numerical analysis. I would say learning MATLAB strengthens my programming logic, and so it would be easier for me to pick up any other programming languages (Python, C...). As a design engineer now, I haven't used MATLAB for years.
If you have the opportunity and are interested in programming, I would recommend you to take it and you wouldn't regret.

BR,
Winnie

 

MATLAB or MATHCAD are mandatory IMOHO.

 

I would be surprised if I see a Mechanical Engineer department in a company have more than 5% of engineers that would be able to use Matlab (in general). Maybe be more in a R&D company or in a very theory based and calculation intensive company. When you are trying to put Matlab (programming) into a job, most likely you are trying to be innovative, or the company itself has been using an existing Matlab program. I'm a fluent Matlab user, but I haven't seen a single project/job in my ME career or my colleage's in using it. Nevertheless, it's a good program to know how to use.

 

Your are absolutely spot on. And this is truly Sad. But ppl shld not make the confusion btw Engineer and Designer/CAD Modeler. You don't expect the same from both.

In my view, there is no way that you can see an Engineer without any solid programing skills. That it have to be with an analytical software like MathLab/Mathcad or via C++ or even VBasic.

But I have been programming routines countless of time in my career. More than often did it put myself in a really weird situation regarding some kind of animosity with some colleague or a project leader.

 

Mathcad is a very useful tool for any type of engineer that does design work. Learn it, if at all possible. It is especially useful for simulations and control algorithms. I also used it like a desk calculator for repetitive calculations.

AceEngineer

 

My MathCad version went warm when I was an active engineer. Now, I am retired and it is not economically sound for me to pay a licence. But, now and then I run into problems for which MathCad would be an excellent tool. On their site they insinuate that some functionality will remain after the 30 days trial licence period has expired.

The formulation is:”You can still use MathCad”. Some commentators on internet state that this is a pure lie, or at least a half lie because it involves paying license for another code. Does anyone knows?

 

Could you be more explicit ? What is that other code.

IF you mean FlexM (the one that check for the validity of your licenses), it might be that using another software already protected by FlexM will keep it active on your PC. Hence the possibility to still fire up MatchCad.

My guess only.

A SolidWorks license, for example, run via FlexM. So if you have SW installed and registered it might do the trick for you. The prob with ppl commenting on the net is that many don't have a valid license installed to run the software they are talking about. Hence, their comments can't really reflect the behavior of the soft. You shld discuss that with the guys at Mathsoft/PTC only.

 

http://communities.ptc.com/thread/53876

 

So most of the work I do as an engineer is on MATLAB. This is true for me and for any other researcher/scientist/student. However, in professional life, to design a product engineers pretty much never use MATLAB. The more useful software is mathCAD because series of calculations are much more easily and quickly performed by Mathcad.

A design engineer uses CAD and 3D modelling software’s to design and the analysis team tests the designs in Ansys or whichever FEM software they use. But a designer always needs to calculate series of numerical values for their design and this is easiest done by using matcad.

Ofcourse you could also do this all by hand, but you will have to type it all in for your report in of the design. And since matcad uses same script that Microsoft word uses, you can directly copy and paste the equations and solutions. Or you could export it as a jpeg file and include it in your report. Simple and easy.

One more advantage of using matcad for me was the speed of typing and reduction of error. In Matlab the equations are not readily visible unless you print them on the screen. This gives rise to error in writing the equation sometimes if the equation is very lengthy. But in matcad the equation is shown as its typed and this reduces the error by far.