A Brief Introduction to Engineering Computation with MATLAB

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What is MATLAB?

MATLAB stands for MATrix LABoratory and is a commercial software application written by The MathWorks, Inc. When you first use MATLAB, you can think of it as a glorified calculator allowing you to perform engineering calculations and plot data. However, MATLAB is more than an advanced scientific calculator, for example MATLAB’s sophisticated numerical computation environment also allows us to analyze data, simulate engineering systems, document and share our code with others.

Why Use MATLAB?

MATLAB has become a defacto standard in many fields of engineering and science. Even a casual exploration of MATLAB should unveil its computational power however a closer look at MATLAB’s graphics and data analysis tools as well as interaction with other applications and programing languages prove why MATLAB is a very strong application for technical computing.

The standard MATLAB installation includes graphics features to visualize engineering and scientific data in 2-D and 3-D plots. We can interactivity build graphs and generate MATLAB command output that can be saved for use in the future. The saved instructions can be called again with different data set to build new plots. The plots created with MATLAB can be exported in various file formats (e.g. .jpg, .png) to embed in Microsoft Word documents or PowerPoint slideshows.

MATLAB also contains interactive tools to explore and analyze data. For example, we can visualize data with one of the many plotting routines, zoom in to plots to take measurements, perform statistical calculations, fit curves to data and evaluate the obtained expression for a desired value. MATLAB interacts with other applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel) and can be called from C code, C++ or Fortran programming language.

Running MATLAB

To use MATLAB, it must be installed on your computer and you can start it just like you start any application on your system or you must have access to a network where it is available.

In POWR 3307, we will use MATLAB by accessing the BCIT network. The network access is platform independent, that is, we can run MATLAB under Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows operating systems through a web browser. The following links provide instructions on how to access and use BCIT’s Apps Anywhere service:

  • Configuring AppsAnywhere on an Apple Macintosh
  • Configuring AppsAnywhere in Windows 7
  • How to open and save files in AppsAnywhere when logging in from a Macintosh
  • How to open and save files in AppsAnywhere when logging in from Windows
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Attribution

Serhat Beyenir. (2016). A Brief Introduction to Engineering Computation with MATLAB. Open Textbooks for Hong Kong. http://www.opentextbooks.org.hk/tertiary-institutions/33089

“A Brief Introduction to Engineering Computation with MATLAB” is one of the free open textbooks for Tertiary level. This selection and arrangement of content as a collection is copyrighted by Serhat Beyenir. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

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