Complete beginner in Mathcad - advice wanted

[cdownie]

Hi all,

This is my first post on the forums and I wanted to ask a general question on gaining proficiency in Mathcad.

In a nutshell, I am an experienced Project Engineer by profession (mainly mechanical & structural bias) but in order to widen my skill set, I have recently been training part-time in Finite Element Analysis, which I enjoyed immensely. To complement this, I asked my colleagues which packages would best complement my new skills in FEA and ANSYS software and Mathcad was one which came highly recommended.

With all of this in mind, I wanted to ask if any of you can offer advice and hopefully point me in the right direction (ie. training courses, PDFs available online) so that I can work on Mathcad from the ground up. I am completely self-financed and so I am looking to do this on a tight budget, but I am motivated and can devote more than enough time to making this happen. Thanks in advance for any input.

Best regards,

- Chris

[StuartBruff]

Have a look at this link: Finite element method with methcad turorial

It gives some pointers to FE under Mathcad.

Stuart

[VladimirN]

Another useful topic and a few links:

1. Theme "Ansys and Mathcad" on forum: Re: Ansys and Mathcad

2. Theme "FEM calculations on mathcad" on forum: FEM calculations on mathcad

3. Additional material "FEM engine, a Poisson solver": DEA-CCAT: finelem_engine, a Poisson solver

4. Additional material "Advanced Finite Elements Analysis" (include Mathcad exmaples): The University of Maine - Mechanical Engineering - MEE 646 – Advanced Finite Elements Analysis

[Fred_Kohlhepp]

Chris,

Well, you're in the right place.  What you get here is free.  There's a lot of information available here, most of it in the form of answers to questions.

A brief search will point you at references on Mathcad.

It's been my experience that you need to learn the editor--how to have Mathcad write the equation that you want.  But most of the document looks like you would write it by hand with a pencil on paper (neater, but it looks the same.)  Integrals look like integrals, equations look like a math book, and so on.

Read the help files (some of them aren't as helpful as they might be.)  But just start playing.  It's easy!  No programming required.  (Programming is available, but you usually aren't going to need it.)

Welcome.

[akelly]

Use V15.  Do not use Prime of any version.  Assuming you purchased a license, you still have access to V15 download and license.  It's still on active maintenance, so don't think it's obsolete software.

The best feature of Mathsoft's Mathcad, up to, and including V15, were the QuickSheets, Tutorials, and E-books.  See Help --> (applicable topic).  These are all given as live Mathcad worksheets.  So you can see a working example of any topic, make changes to see the effects, and copy / paste the equations into your own worksheets.  You can easily teach yourself with these V15 resources.

Prime doesn't have anything like this, which is a huge step backwards, considering Mathsoft has been doing since the early 90s (2 decades ago).

The V15 PDF manual is a pretty good resource.  It's kind of hidden.  Help --> Tutorials --> User's Guide.  It's a pretty big help with basic usage.  Nothing beats a big thick dry well-written book.

Help --> User Forums will take you to another section in the PTC Community with user-posted worksheets.  There are a lot more examples with Prime, but there's still a lot of content that can be opened in V15.  You can install Prime 3.x side-by-side with V15, so you can open the newer worksheets, but you need to do your learning and work in V15 as the primary source.

[RichardJ]

In addition to what the others have said:

Use Mathcad 15, which you can download here: Thank You for Your Interest in PTC Mathcad 15 | PTC. Aside from the fact that Mathcad Prime is not as capable, it can't save backwards to any earlier version. Version 3.1 can't even save back to version 3.0! That will make it much harder for you to get help here, because many of us can't read a Prime 3.1 file.

Go through the tutorials (whether in Mathcad 15 or Prime). They are quite good, and will give you a reasonable basis to learn Mathcad in more detail.