Revision history [back]

If you'd like a personal account of Sage being used in engineering, my fiance is a mechanical engineer at the University of Washington who is currently using Sage in her work. She does research in modeling chemical combustion reactors. (Or something like that.)

One of her main projects is to develop a reduced mechanism model of the reactions taking place. An approach she's looking into is a graph-theoretic approach: construct a digraph where the vertices are all of the major elements and molecules present in the reactor and the directed edges represent chemical dependencies / reaction directions. (E.g. formation of H20 requires the presence of hydrogen and oxygen.) The goal is to find a subgraph that models the reactor to a "close enough" accuracy from the full model.

Her work requires a substantial amount of numerics as well. Since Sage includes Numpy/Scipy (a powerful numerics package similar to Matlab) as well as powerful graph theoretic algorithms and interface, Sage has become her primary software fo choice for her research.

In general, I've found that many of my engineering colleagues use Matlab in their work. Numpy/Scipy is a free, open-source alternative. (You can use Numpy/Scipy/matplotlib independent of the Enthought Python Distribution via Sage.) They've all been more or less pleased when I showed them this Python-based alternative to Matlab. Also, I believe that Boeing has invited William Stein to give a talk or two about Sage at one of the Seattle/Everett plants so there exists some industrial interest in Sage as well.