Best toolboxes for my needs?

Hello, I'm a mechanical engineering student. I've recently restarted a project I was working on, designing a centrifugal turbojet engine for R/C aircraft and I decided to use MATLAB for analysis and simulations. I'm getting the student suite package and wanted to know what other toolboxes will suit my needs. I will also be designing a small UAV in the future. I will need to do motion analysis, FEA, CFD, heat transfer/thermodynamics analysis for these projects.

So far, It looks like the partial differentiation equations and the aerospace toolboxes are the only other toolboxes I may need. Are there any other toolboxes I should be getting while I still can get the new license discount? Are the two I mentioned worth getting for my purposes?

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

If your simulations generate images (heatmaps, etc.) and you want to do any image analysis on them, then you should get the Image Processing Toolbox. If you're doing Monte Carlo simulations and want to do statistical analysis, then the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox might be helpful.

[William Roseberry]

Interesting, I never thought any of the image processing toolboxes would be useful. How exactly would it benefit me? I can't imagine what I would use it for, optimization using images rather than equations?

I'm also not familiar with Monte Carlo simulations and especially not with machine learning. I'm not sure I'll go that route, but it seems like monte carlo is just a statistical method for optimization? I'll have to look into it more to see if it's going to be worth the time learning along with the two other toolboxes.

Thanks for the quick answer!

[Image Analyst]

Like for example if you had some mathematical equations that describe heat from a torch, rocket blast, engine exhaust, or whatever, and you wanted to know the area where the heat is more than 400 degrees. Or you wanted to know the maximum extent (length) of the hot spot, or the mean temperature within a region that is above 400 degrees. Or you wanted to know the uniformity of the temperature within some region. There could be any number of things you want to know about a temperature field.

Answer 2

[Precise Simulation]

For FEA, FEM, and CFD simulations the PDE Toolbox or FEATool Multiphysics toolbox, possibly used in conjunction with the FEniCS FEM or FeatFlow CFD solvers depending how large your models might be.