jn190068@longs.LANCE.ColoState.EDU (Jay Nestle) (05/12/91)
I have recently completed a course here on composites engineering. Part of this course required writing a laminate analysis code. The in-course material was presented based on FORTRAN and was aimed at being ran on 386's. I decided to write this code on my 48! Well, it works great!!!! The 48 calculates a 4 layer laminate ABD matrix in less than 20 seconds. The PC's only take 4 seconds, but for a calculator I was really impressed. My instructor was really shocked I even got it to work. This is by no means a trivial computational problem and the 48 just loves it! There were disadvantages to using the 48 like no n-dimensional arrays (understandable considering memory constraints) but I got around this by making a complex directory structure that simulates n-dimensional arrays. At first I thought this would be slow but amazingly it is fairly fast. By far my interface to running the program is superior to the PC versions. And extra bonuses like the built-in matrix operations allowed me to program it in less than 3k of memory! All of the PC programs were much larger and harder to debug. Another bonus was the graphics output I could produce. The program will draw a laminate schematic complete with layer names, geometric orientations, and materials constructed of, and I might add does it fairly quickly! I also used the statistics bar plot option to plot the stress distributions after they were calculated. Neither of the graphics options have ever even been attempted in the history of this course. If someone would like a copy of this program and some basic instructions/theory of use please email me and I will send it. If enough people would like it posted I will. A rough estimate I have come up with is that the 48 will take me at lease 2 more years to master!! What a wonderful product!!!! Jay Nestle jn190068@longs.lance.colostate.edu "Save the earth, develop space." - Bumper Sticker