Sunday, 4 August 2013

Why MATLAB? Advantages of learning it

MATLAB is a high-performance language for technical computing. It integrates computation, visualization, and programming environment. Furthermore, MATLAB is a modern programming language environment: it has sophisticated data structures, contains built-in editing and debugging tools, and supports object-oriented programming. These factors make MATLAB an excellent tool for teaching and research. MATLAB has many advantages compared to conventional computer languages (e.g. C, FORTRAN) for solving technical problems. MATLAB is an interactive system whose basic data element is an array that does not require dimensioning. The software package has been commercially available since 1984 and is now considered as a standard tool at most universities and industries worldwide. It has powerful built-in routines that enable a very wide variety of computations. It also has easy to use graphics commands that make the visualization of results immediately available. Specific applications are collected in packages referred to as toolbox. There are toolboxes for signal processing, symbolic computation, control theory, simulation, power system engineering, optimization, and several other fields of applied science and engineering.

MATLAB allows you to focus on your course work and applications rather than on programming details. It enables you to solve many numerical problems in a fraction of the time it would take you to write a program in a lower level language. MATLAB helps you better understand and apply concepts in applications ranging from engineering and mathematics to chemistry, biology, and economics. MATLAB products are used in a broad range of industries, including automotive, aerospace, electronics, environmental, telecommunications, computer peripherals, finance, and medical. More than 500,000 technical professionals at the world’s most innovative technology companies, government research labs, financial institutions, and at more than 2,500 universities rely on MATLAB and Simulink as the fundamental tools for their engineering and scientific work.

Simulink, a companion program to MATLAB, is an interactive system for simulating nonlinear dynamic systems. It is a graphical mouse-driven program that allows you to model a system by drawing a block diagram on the screen and manipulating it dynamically. It can work with linear, nonlinear, continuous-time, discrete-time, multirate, and hybrid systems. Blocksets are add-ons to Simulink that provide additional libraries of blocks for specialized applications like communications, signal processing, and power systems. Often it is mistaken as a plug a play too be naive students but it this one is a excellent modeling and design tool. Learning and designing in Simulink itself is quite useful as well as resourceful in many ways.

This course of MATLAB for Engineering Students is a document for an introductory course in MATLAB and technical computing. This course does not provide a comprehensive introduction or a complete coverage of MATLAB. Instead, it focuses on the specific features of MATLAB that are useful for an engineer. The practice sessions are used with one main goal: to allow students to become familiar with computer software (e.g., MATLAB) to solve application problems. We assume that the students have no prior experience with MATLAB. The availability of technical computing environment such as MATLAB is now reshaping the role and applications of computer laboratory projects to involve students in more intense problem-solving experience. This availability also provides an opportunity to easily conduct numerical experiments and to tackle realistic and more complicated engineering problems.


1 comment:

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