You may have across some obscure looking symbols on engineering drawings (that’s “blueprints” for you *cough cough* “seasoned” engineers and technicians) that look something like this: This ladies and gentlemen is a feature control frame – a GD&T Feature Control Frame. This bad boy does wonders in terms of saving us cash () and locking …
Continue reading “What is Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)?”
In mechanical design, or structural design, the all most important thing to consider is failure. Rather, how to prevent design failure. As design engineers, we are all too familiar with the stress-strain curve: Our eyes automatically go to the , which represents the yield stress point of the material. That is, the point at which …
The Crank-Nicolson method is a popular finite difference numerical method for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) – which are equations with two or more independent variables. The 1-D heat equation below has two independent variables, the time variable, t, and the spatial dimension, x. The question becomes, how does the Crank-Nicolson method to solve PDEs …
Continue reading “Crank-Nicolson VS pdepe MATLAB partial-differential equation solver”
Solving partial differential equations is hard, luckily we have numerical methods to help us break apart abstract mathematical concepts into the most simplest elements – the Crank-Nicolson method allows for a simple way to solve parabolic PDEs. Let’s look at the classic example of a one-dimensional rod that is subjected to two opposing temperatures on …
