Engineering and Physics Simulation in the Palm of Your Hand
The creative instinct can strike when you least expect it.. While we would hope that our best ideas come to us while we are best-equipped to take action, the reality is that they will frequently hit while we are laying in bed, riding on a train, or out for a walk. On some cases, they may even come while we are sitting in a boring meeting away from the comfort zone of our workstation. For most of us, our mobile devices are never more than a few feet away. MOMDYN lets you take action and build on your ideas in the moment, and watch them take motion in the palm of your hand.
An Entry Point For Dynamics Students and Professionals
Multibody dynamics simulation is increasingly becoming an essential discipline for the development of complex mechanical systems. Recent years have seen the rise of many excellent software solutions, many belonging to larger multidisciplinary computer aided engineering packages. These products are great, expansive solutions that can be a pleasure to learn, use, and occasionally abuse. For many professionals, these provide for a lucrative career or business model. For others, the cost is a significant barrier to entry. MOMDYN presents an accessible alternative for engineering students or developing professionals who want to learn the basic principles behind how the advanced software works so they can feel confident in applying those tools in their future careers.
Build On Your Mobile Device, Analyze On A Desktop
Your mobile device does a lot of amazing things, but no one would call it a high performance computer. Want to run your model once? No problem, MOMDYN has you covered. Want to run 100,000 cases in a Monte Carlo study? You’re going to want a professional workstation or computing cluster for that. This is advanced stuff, but MOMDYN can help: With the Export menu, you can choose to automatically generate Python source code that will replicate the same equations and parameters that you set up on your device, and can be executed in a Python environment using common and freely available packages. Want phase plots, frequency spectra, or to integrate your mechanism model with another physical or control system? If you can code it, you can do it.
Getting Started
Help documentation is here.
I post example dynamics problems analyzed in MOMDYN on the Blog, and/or on the documentation site. For starters, I recommend viewing the following two tutorial-examples:
I post example dynamics problems analyzed in MOMDYN on the Blog, and/or on the documentation site. For starters, I recommend viewing the following two tutorial-examples:
Acknowledgments
SymPy
The symbolic objects necessary for dynamics modeling are derived from SymPy,
mpmath
Matrix classes and various numerical methods are derived from mpmath.
numpy
Array classes and various fast numerical methods are derived from numpy (Android only).
Disclaimer
MOMDYN is developmental software. The interface and back-end analysis engine are subject to change without notice. While I take pride in the analytical core of this application, I do not certify it as credible* simulation software for critical analyses. Perhaps one day it will have that degree of reliability, but I assure you as of today it is developmental and will have its bugs and weird behaviors. For educational purposes, however, I think its a good tool.
* A credible simulation program is one that has been verified to produce an identical solution to existing accredited software given same modeling assumptions, has been validated to match real-world datasets, and has been formally reviewed by experts in the field.