Saturday, October 5, 2013

PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 Released

PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 Features and Functions

PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 delivers new capabilities that allow engineers to optimize their critical design processes

Global Definitions
Variable definitions are the backbone of your PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 worksheets. Some variables are specific to individual calculation steps and some will be utilized throughout the worksheet.
The Global Definition operator allows you to define and evaluate a variable anywhere in your worksheet without having to worry about calculation order. This makes both worksheet management and documentation presentation easier – constants and parameters can be defined as ‘true’ throughout your worksheet and can be placed close to the end result of the calculation to support ‘what if’ analyses, as well as for clear and concise presentation of your work.
Math in Text
PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 is the industry standard for engineering calculations and a simple and presentable text flow is important for easy to read, easy to interpret worksheets based on those calculations.
PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 allows math and text to be seamlessly integrated to provide a natural text flow that increases the readability of your worksheet definitions, design notes and explanatory text. Live math can be inserted, pasted and moved anywhere within text to augment worksheet presentation with content that will update on upstream changes in calculation. By enabling math within text, PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 allows you much greater scope with your worksheet presentation.
Templates
Do you find you always start a worksheet with the same header content, margin size and initial variable definitions? Instead of having to create that content every time you want to start a new worksheet, with PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 you can create a template that includes all that content and simply use that as the basis for every new worksheet you create.
PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 Templates save you time and effort by providing the ability to define and organize desired content in such a way as to allow simple and structured re-use in creating new worksheets. Anything you can do with a worksheet, be it adding calculation content or changing documentation formatting, can be saved in a template. Documents can be standardized, IP can be captured and your desired format can be reused as often as you need. PTC supplies several default templates as examples that can be used as is or as a basis for your own templates. You can also create, edit and store personal or company defined templates in locations easy to configure and access through the software.
Math Formatting
As a fully functional engineering calculation documentation tool, PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 already supports standard text formatting. To allow even greater worksheet documentation flexibility you can now format your live math too.
Math font, font size, color and highlight can be changed to suit personal, company or industry standard documentation expectations. You can now do things such as direct reader focus by highlighting important results, separate specific calculation elements by assigning them different colors and match text formatting to produce a more coherent reading experience for users of your worksheet. With both text and math formatting you get the full suite of formatting options for all your documentation needs.
Custom Functions
PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 comes fully loaded with hundreds of built-in functions that cover a multitude of engineering disciplines. With Custom Functions you can now write and integrate your own functions, customizing your working environment to suit whatever engineering needs you have. Whether you need specialized niche-market engineering content, use personally modified versions of existing functions or have an idea for a new function to optimize whatever engineering problem you may be working on, Custom Functions allows you to write and install those functions with the PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 environment so you can access them in the worksheet and use them alongside existing content.
Advanced Numerics
PTC Mathcad Prime 3.0 continues to improve calculation capabilities. Building on the improvements seen in Prime 2.0 (native 64-bit support, linear algebra, signal processing, just to name a few), Prime 3.0 adds new matrix decompositions functions: LU, QR and Cholesky. These functions replace the old lu, qr and cholesky counterparts. The new functions are up to 100 times faster, provide extended capability (such as pivoting, and complex number support) and return the result in easier to work with format.
Continuous improvement in calculation capability allows users evaluate a greater number of, and more complex and computationally demanding, cases in less time, ultimately leading to more optimal designs.
Excel Component
You’ve got a large data set in Excel that’s critical to your design. But you don’t want to use that tool for your calculations. PTC Mathcad‘s Excel component was designed for exactly that problem. PTC Mathcad is the industry standard for engineering calculations because it saves you time, reduces risk and integrates with many tools you may already be using. The Excel component is extremely easy to use, and allows you to leverage data in existing spreadsheets. No messy conversion of data. No new tool to learn. When you combine the engineering power of PTC Mathcad with the familiarity of Excel's tabular data capabilities, you’ll save time and effort, improve visibility and sharing, and enjoy better integration with legacy systems.
Symbolics
PTC Mathcad’s symbolic calculation functionality goes a long way toward making your job easier. Like many features in the software, it automates a task that is cumbersome, time-consuming and risky if done manually. With symbolics, you can set up the right form of a formula before plugging in the numbers. Routine updates to downstream computations are managed automatically, so your documents remain up to date even as your formulas change. Symbolic calculation even lets you put derivation steps that are often done on paper right in the document so it’s easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to verify.
Whether you’re transferring knowledge, setting up standard calculations, showing those calculations step-by-step, or verifying and validating a design—documents with explicit derivation and calculations make the process easier, more effective, and less error prone.
Solving Capabilities
PTC Mathcad is easy to use, but it’s no simple calculator. Its advanced features, like solve blocks, make it a powerful engineering tool. The solve block capability lets you quickly and easily solve systems of linear, non-linear, and differential equations. It lets you solve any number of equations and unknown variables – you can analyze a wide variety of problems according to a set of constraints that you specify. Enter as much or as little information as you need to solve the problem. The software takes care of the rest. This saves you time, improves your accuracy, and lets you do more without additional programming or tools.
Advanced Plotting
What if you had the ability to look at your data in three dimensions, manipulate and adjust it, before committing to a design? PTC Mathcad lets you do exactly that. It’s not an engineering design tool, but it can save you from late stage design changes, problems with prototyping, or making fast adjustments to changing customer requirements. 3-D plotting in PTC Mathcad is simple to use, and incredibly effective because it lets you work faster with fewer mistakes. Create a plot with the click of a button; both surface and curved based plots automatically rescale when you make adjustments to the data. Any engineer can easily manipulate, analyze and visualize complex data right in the worksheet. The result is a much more complete insight into the design intent, with better documentation of calculations and easier, more accurate verification and analysis.