13-08-2012, 03:47 PM
Dynamics and Vibrations MATLAB tutorial
Dynamics and Vibrations MATLAB tutorial.pdf (Size: 1.37 MB / Downloads: 233)
What is MATLAB?
You can think of MATLAB as a sort of graphing calculator on steroids – it is designed to help you
manipulate very large sets of numbers quickly and with minimal programming. Operations on numbers
can be done efficiently by storing them as matrices. MATLAB is particularly good at doing matrix
operations (this is the origin of its name).
How does MATLAB differ fromMathematica?
They are similar in some ways, although they use vastly different languages. Mathematica is better
suited to algebraic calculations; MATLAB is better at numerical calculations and data processing. But
most things that can be done in Mathematica can also be done in MATLAB, and vice-versa.
Why do we have to learn MATLAB?
You don’t. Lawyers, chefs, professional athletes, and belly dancers don’t use MATLAB. But if you want
to be an engineer, you will find it helpful to know MATLAB. MATLAB is widely used for engineering
calculations for which a special purpose computer program has not been written. But it will probably be
superseded by something else during your professional career – very little software survives without
major changes for longer than 10 years or so.
Starting MATLAB
MATLAB is installed on the engineering instructional facility. You can find it in the Start>Programs
menu.
You can also download and install MATLAB on your own computer
You must have key access installed on your computer, and you must be connected to the Brown network
to run MATLAB. For off campus access, you will need a VPN connection to Brown to be able to use
MATLAB. You can find the VPN connection software for Windows at . There’s also a Unix
version but if you are using Unix you are smart enough to figure out how to find it by yourself… And
you may not need to do this tutorial anyway.