Can an old dog teach new tricks?

[HarveyHensley]

Welcome to my blog on Mathcad and chemical engineering.  This is my first blogging experience so I hope you will give me some time to climb the learning curve.

Blog objectives

I'm new to the PlanetPTC Community, but I've been using Mathcad for probably 20+ years.  I'm starting this blog for several reasons:

• to raise the visibility of chemical engineering users in the Mathcad community (I realize that there is a Chemical Engineering "space" in the community, but I didn't see a blog on that topic.  If I missed it, I apologize.)
• to share my experiences, both with Mathcad, and in engineering in general
• to increase the likelihood that new chemical engineers will stay with Mathcad
• to increase the likelihood that PTC will "stay with" chemical engineers.

The stimulus for the blog

My first contribution to the community was a discussion "Why is Mathcad not used more by chemical engineers."  There have been over 700 viewings which means that maybe 100 people were following the discussion.  It would be great if 100 people initially follow this blog: it would be greater still if the followers increased with time.

I decided to start a blog instead of multiple discussions.  To me, discussions get messy, with responses to responses, and on and on.  My plan with the blog is to state my case, opinion, example, and then let people comment.  I don't plan to reply directly to those comments, but I will allow them to be viewed.  However, your comments may be the source of a followup blog, so please do comment, criticize, agree, suggest.

An initial peak at the author

Finally, the meaning of the titles for this blog and for this first posting.  I've been a chemical engineering for 46 years.  Some of my ways may be "old school", but they have worked well.  I also believe that I've stayed reasonably "new school" as my career evolved, but more on that later.

Next topic:

"Process Development: Scale Down not Scale Up!"   I hope you come back!

 

[DanMarotta]

Harvey,

A chemical engineering blog is exactly what this community needs. It definitely fills a void, so I'm thrilled you stepped up to offer your expertise and views.

I'll do everything I can to help get the word out to other chemical engineers who are using Mathcad and hopefully drive rich and meaningful conversation.

I'm looking forward to your future posts. Let me know if there's anything else can do.

-Dan

[ecard]

Harvey, great initiative! I'm a chemical engineer but I've never worked as one; I studied environmental engineering in grad school and worked all my life in that field. I've used MathCad on and off since version 1, much less so now that I mostly do management.

I have encountered most of the challenges for Mathcad adoption described in the discussion you started a few weeks ago and which I just read (btw, the link to your blog does not work). In my own experience young engineers tend to know Excel and perhaps Matlab, the former because it's inexpensive when bundled as part of Office and the latter because their professors in college "pushed it" and academic licenses are inexpensive. Companies like Excel for basically the same reasons, and some like Matlab because their young employees already know it.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to your insight and posts, and will do my best to contribute whenever possible.

[HarveyHensley]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the support.  I hope I can keep everyone interested, at least for awhile.

The link to my blog doesn't work now because I originally created a personal blog to which you replied.  After two posts, we moved it into the Chemical Engineering space for better visibility.  That caused the link to get disconnected.  I'll go back and create a new link because there are still people viewing that discussion on Mathcad and ChEs.

I hope we can get some more contributions of ChE examples and even other blogs in the ChE space so non users can get a better idea how Mathcad might be useful.  After we get some more content, we need to encourage colleagues to visit the Chemical Engineering space in PlanetPTC.  They don't even need to sign up for an account, just come in from a Google search of the underlined.

Harvey