Process
Scientists within the field of computational mechanics follow a list of tasks to analyze their target mechanical process:
1. A mathematical model of the physical phenomenon is made. This usually involves expressing the natural or engineering system in terms of partial differential equations. This step uses physics to formalize a complex system.
2. The mathematical equations are converted into forms which are suitable for digital computation. This step is called discretization because it involves creating an approximate discrete model from the original continuous model. In particular, it typically translates a partial differential equation (or a system thereof) into a system of algebraic equations. The processes involved in this step are studied in the field of numerical analysis.
3. Computer programs are made to solve the discretized equations using direct methods (which are single step methods resulting in the solution) or iterative methods (which start with a trial solution and arrive at the actual solution by successive refinement). Depending on the nature of the problem, supercomputers or parallel computers may be used at this stage.
4. The mathematical model, numerical procedures, and the computer codes are verified using either experimental results or simplified models for which exact analytical solutions are available. Quite frequently, new numerical or computational techniques are verified by comparing their result with those of existing well-established numerical methods. In many cases, benchmark problems are also available. The numerical results also have to be visualized and often physical interpretations will be given to the results.
Read more about this topic: Computational Mechanics
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)