Everyday Engineering!

How to estimate the memory required for an ANSYS model

faridani — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 08:24:47 +0000

I found this paragraph in the “ANSYS Mechanical- Powerful Nonlinear Solver” by Grama R. Bhashyam

“Typically, the sparse solver requires 1 GB of memory per million degrees of freedom (DOFs), and 10 GB of disk drive”

Using this rule of thumb one can estimate the memory required to solve one’s FEM model

CFD in Solidworks

faridani — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:28:26 +0000

I found some good videos on youtube today. CFD was always a fascinating method to me, I can understand FEM but CFD is amazing, how a PDE can generate these amazing results always blows my mind, look at this amazing video. I guess doing this in Fluent is much harder (FLUENT is more powerful though)

anyways, here are some videos on COSMOS engine in SolidWorks

Pump Flow using SolidWorks CFD (2006) Training
Electronics Airflow using SolidWorks CFD
Engine Airflow using SolidWorks CFD

Search yotube for more videos on Solidworks and its Cosmos engine

Mathematica vs. Maple

faridani — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 22:08:53 +0000

I’m a Maple fan, and using Maple in many of my everyday tasks is really my passion. I love to use it to derive more theoretical support for my projects. (for those who do not know what the Maple is, it is a computer application that unlike many regular computer languages like fortran and Matlab, solves and derives the formula symbolically)

Yesterday I was reading an article in the eWeek magazine about the “Killer apps of all time” and recognized that Mathematica is one of them

I have put off using Mathematica for a long time however I know that in many mathematical tasks it is even faster and smarter than Maple (my friend who is working on his PhD in physics told me that Mathematica can find the singular matrices faster than Maple and it sometimes tests the singularity by multiplying two rows before actually finding the determinant) as we all know Mathematica was made by Dr Wolfrom who got his PhD when he was 20

Another reason that I didn’t want to migrate to Mathematica from Maple was that the “Symbolic Toolbox” of Matlab actually uses Maple as its kernel

let me enumarated the pros and cons of using Mathematica over Maple:

Pros:

Faster, Smarter
Cheaper (student version is free for both Unix and Win)
Better customer support in the US (Maple is a Canadian company)
Is one of the 25 Killer apps

Cons:

Maple is more user friendly
Maple is a part of “Matlab Symbolic Toolbox”
I already know Maple

Decision:

I’ll move towards the Mathematica gradually while keeping my Maple knowledge. Probably I’ll remove my Maple from my laptop for a while and install Mathematica instead for a while in order to force myself to learn it

Beautiful Engineering

faridani — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 08:37:51 +0000

The largest drain hole in the world! Monticello Dam, CA

Leadership

faridani — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:11:28 +0000

Recently I have been to a couple of interviews, mostly for team-lead positions, the common question among all of the interviewers was “what are the characteristics of a good leader”

I did a little research today, found some good articles, in this particular article the author has enumerated the main personal characteristics of a leader

Vision
Motivation
Emotional Intelligence
Empowering Others
Being Trustworthy
Taking Risks
Focused
Have a sense of humor

Alright!!!

faridani — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 09:47:41 +0000

Alright, Here is the deal:

I write on this blog almost every week (one or two posts a week), loyally and honestly, about my weaknesses and streights along with my interests

Let’s see if I can find a good job with this blog