Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team.  Posts in the series include:

• Part 1 - 

Dr. Gilbert Lai is a mentor for the FIRST Robotics team SWAT 771. He is helping an all girls team from grades 7-12 design a basketball-shooting robot for this year’s annual FIRST Robotics Competition. Dr. Lai is using MapleSim and Maple to help the team understand the principles involved and design their robot. This blog post is part of a series that chronicles the progress of the team.  Posts in the series include:

• Part 1 - 

Liquid flowing in a pipeline has inertia.  If a valve at the end of the pipeline suddenly closes, a pressure surge hits the valve, and travels through the pipeline at the speed of sound. The damping effect of fluid friction gradually attenuates the pressure wave.

This phenomenon is called water hammer and can cause damage significant damage, sometimes even rupturing the pipeline.

The pressure wave often produces audible sound. If you’ve ever heard...

> restart; with(LinearAlgebra); assume(omega, real, omega > 0);
> G := 9;
> z := (xi^2+xi/(1+xi^2))/(1+xi^2);
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder
> C := `<,>`(1-z, seq(sin((n-1)*Pi*z), n = 2 .. G));
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder
> g := Transpose(C);
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder
> A := Multiply(C, g);
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder

> restart; with(LinearAlgebra); assume(omega, real, omega > 0);
> G := 9;
> z := (xi^2+xi/(1+xi^2))/(1+xi^2);
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder
> C := `<,>`(1-z, seq(sin((n-1)*Pi*z), n = 2 .. G));
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder
> g := Transpose(C);
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder
> A := Multiply(C, g);
`output redirected...`> print(); # input placeholder

A prospective customer recently asked if we had a MapleSim model of a double pipe heat exchanger. Heat exchangers are a critical unit operation in the process industries, and accurate models are needed for process control studies.  I couldn't find an appropriate model so I decided to derive the dynamic equations, and implement them using MapleSim's custom component interface.  I'll outline my modeling strategy in this blog post.

Like many in the technology industry, I am a big fan of science fiction films and I’ve written in the past about how exciting it is for me to have a job where science fiction and reality literally meet. Over the past few months, several key projects from various Maple and MapleSim users caught my attention for various reasons and once again, I was forced to giggle publicly as the shear cool factor of these applications overcame my normal mature demeanor.

On Tuesday August 10, 2010, the first meeting of an ad hoc group focused on exploring the use of MapleSim in the engineering curriculum met at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.  Faculty from McMaster University, Kettering University, Lawrence Technical University, University of Waterloo, Ryerson University, University of Ontario Inst. of Technology, and the State University of New York (Buffalo and Binghamton).

The full-day workshop provided an ideal...