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Originally Posted by fika84
Sorry if I came off as harsh. I didn't mean it to be that way (Engineers and social skills.... ha!).
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It's all good, mathematicians aren't exactly known for social skills either!
Quote:
Originally Posted by fika84
I personally only took one FD class and didn't like it much or my teacher (probably more teacher). My favorite part of the class talked about making miniature prototypes of objects and using the power of FD to adjust the fluids used in the tests. But in essence I think you're right about the Navier Stokes equations and getting them right. I just remember it getting confusing FAST with multiple fluids and difficult geometries for the fluids to travel through.
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Miniaturization of prototypes sounds pretty cool, I know that's a big part of Formula 1 engineering. You basically just scale the reynolds number of a fluid to compensate for the smaller size, right?
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Originally Posted by fika84
When I speak of having to solve things by hand I'm referring to when I had to do it for Finite Element Analysis. Our teacher would made us do matrices that took 4-6 pages taped together by hand before he would let us use Solidworks. Of course you can simplify FEA problems by reducing the number of nodes to do a "back of the napkin" calculation and make sure the software was setup properly. It's very easy to over fix geometry and get false results in FEA.
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I had the exact same experience working with stupidly large matrices by hand in one of my applied linear algebra classes. Those teachers are plain sadistic.
I'm curious how geometries come into play when doing FEA by hand. I don't have much(hic. any) experience with engineering. What do the matrices represent? Do you basically make a matrix that represents cartesian point approximations of the properties of a fluid, and then evolve the matrix based on neighboring cells? (if that makes any sense)
The advantage and disadvantage of being a mathematician is that everything makes sense at a theoretical level, but I have no practical understanding of how things are done in the field
