free software for engineers

[dudleybenton]

Two programs you may find useful are digitizing with the mouse and curve-fitting. I frequently use the snapshot tool on a PDF document, open the digitizer, and it automatically loads the image from the clipboard. When you exit (or select copy data), it automatically copies the results to the clipboard, which can be directly pasted into Excel. The curve-fitter works similarly: cut-and-paste. The curve-fitter will also create a function that you can paste as an Excel macro, so you don't have to worry with transferring the numbers or formulas. It handles y(x) and also f(x,y,z,...) up to 9 variables. On the same site you will find several other freebies: chemical reaction solver, cooling tower analyzer, gas properties (NASA Glenn), nonlinear equation solver, numerical integration, potential flow (boundary element method), polygon editor (great for editing contours and creating block diagrams), psychrometrics (moist air properties), particle tracker, and several graphics programs, one of which (TP2) is similar to Tecplot, only free. http://dudleybenton.altervista.org/software/index.html