Ask HN: Software to Write Engineering Calculations?

5 points·viktarthatb··4 comments

For those who have a civil/structural/electrical/mechanical engineering background, what non-programming tools did you use to write your design/verification calculations? What was your experience using it?

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Most real world situations are often modelled in simulation software now. Look up CFD / FEA. Only the very early front end engineering design is applying engineering science on paper.

Other than that it's the tribal knowledge of the company and a smattering of "what we did before" + what the supplier can provide, that drives new designs/mechanisms etc.

In Civil engineering everything is designed to building codes so they should have standard templates for showing that the thing they are building is up to code and have it signed off by a Chartered/Professional Engineer.

Probably less than 5% of an engineering company today is actually doing math / working through free body diagrams and calculating component cross sections based on strength of materials / engineering statics and dynamics principles.

Word is actually good for writing them down if it's mostly equations. It has tons of shortcuts that can make typing them down pretty quick. Other people can easily open and comment on them.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/linear-format-equ...

When documents got longer, I would also use LyX (https://www.lyx.org/) because word can get unstable with really long documents.

I tend toward general tools like spreadsheets and paper because I don't do those sorts of calculations every day and because the record of the calculation has a lifetime of approximately a decade...the life of the project plus seven years as a business record.

Because that is the nature of my work.

I don't personally use it, but you might find Blockpad interesting https://blockpad.net/

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