Introduction to Engineering Analysis

Upon completion of ENGR 1180 the student should gain enough familiarity with MATLAB to:

• understand basic input and output syntax
• create different object types such as variables, vectors, arrays, matrices and structures
• perform operations on different object types using built-in commands
• write scripts and functions to execute and simplify multiple commands
• understand flow control including: if-then, for, while, break, try/catch, switch
• create various plots types used in science and engineering, such as:  2D plots, 3D plots, subplots, overlaid plots, piecewise plots, bar plots, vector fields
• use object handles to automate the task of modifying and formatting plots
• understand strings; perform basic operations on them
• import, export, read and write various file types such as: text, binary, Excel, image and video
• understand the need for, and the use of, MEX files
• understand various toolboxes used in engineering analysis
• perform arithmetic operations on complex numbers; work with complex valued objects
• compute permutations and combinations
• perform arithmetic operations on vectors and matrices; calculate numerically the determinant and inverse of a matrix
• solve numerically systems of linear and non-linear equations; solve numerically practical problems containing systems of equations
• perform computations with the Binomial and Poisson probability mass functions for discrete random variables, the Normal probability density function and cumulative distribution function for continuous random variables
• compute the mean, variance and standard deviation for a sample data set
• perform linear regression and correlation analysis on a sample data set
• perform polynomial interpolation on a sample data set
• determine numerically the solutions to non-linear equations using the bisection method or the Newton-Raphson method
• compute numerically the derivative of a function using finite-differences
• compute numerically the value of an integral using various numerical quadrature methods: midpoint, trapezoid, Simpson’s rule, adaptive methods