Mathcad

Mathcad is an engineering calculation solution utilized by leading companies to drive engineering excellence, protect engineering calculation intellectual property, leverage intellectual capital, and improve organizational efficiency and productivity.

Today's top engineers use Mathcad to perform, document and share calculation and design work. The unique Mathcad visual format and scratchpad interface integrate standard mathematical notation, text and graphs in a single worksheet - making Mathcad ideal for knowledge capture, calculation reuse, and engineering collaboration.

Mathcad drives innovation and offers significant personal and process productivity advantages for product development and engineering design projects. Unlike proprietary calculating tools and spreadsheets, Mathcad lets engineers design and document engineering calculations simultaneously with comprehensive applied math functionality and dynamic, unit-aware calculations.

Benefits:
- Easy to learn and use - no special programming skills required
- Increases productivity, saving engineers time and reducing errors
- Improves verification and validation of critical calculations
- Promotes calculation best practices and reuse of calculation content
- Complete documentation of calculations supports standards compliance

Features:
Built in flexibility
Hundreds of built-in functions, additional content libraries and extension packs

Complete math functionality
Including dynamic, unit-aware calculations

Integrated standard mathematical notation, text and graphics
All contained in a single worksheet

Intuitive, white-board interface
Lets you simultaneously design and document engineering calculations

Easy to use help features
Guided tutorials for all operations

Mathcad within the product development process:

CAD

Mathcad is easily used to create and capture critical upfront design conditions, constraints, and assumptions within the early stages of product development during requirements gathering and conceptual design. Mathcad is also used in this phase to predict the behavior of the design, thus contributing the shortening of design and testing cycle. During the detailed design phase, when 2D or 3D CAD models are created, results calculated in Mathcad can be linked directly to the design geometries and used for downstream calculations to ensure design performance criteria are met.

CAE
During the analysis phase of product development, Mathcad calculations are used in conjunction with other CAE simulation software such as finite-element analysis or computational fluid dynamics software, to verify structural integrity of designs, ensure safety, and verify computer aided analysis results. Essentially, CAE is used to validate the predictions made in the requirements gathering and concept design phase.

Prototyping and real world testing
Lastly, the robust computational capabilities of Mathcad provide the ability to analyze data from field validation leveraging prototypes and real world testing to further interrogate and verify functional specifications and performance characteristics. The easy to use charting capabilities improve the way in which information is displayed and utilized to graph and interpret the results.

Recap
This approach to product design builds upon the successful application and capture of knowledge and intellect. The electronic format of Mathcad ensures the documentation can be managed and tracked in the same way a CAD document is managed throughout the product development process. The XML format of Mathcad worksheets provides additional benefits allowing CAD applications and other downstream deliverable to easily utilize Mathcad calculations to drive CAD models and publish content rich documentation.

For more information on Mathcad, please contact your local LEAP office.