This site is a vast collection of valuable material constants and parameters. Search these tables for fluid densities, gas constants, and much more!
This knowledge engine can compute almost any mathematical expression that an undergraduate could encounter. The engine also can show step-by-step solutions of problems in easy-to-follow formatting, though this feature is only available in the non-free version of the engine.
Written at MIT, this terminal-based airfoil analysis program is a great hands-on tool to learn more about airfoil aerodynamics. This program will be used in some of Clarkson's aero courses. Explore its impressive capabilities!
Another free airfoil analysis tool, this program provides many of the same basic airfoil analysis functions as XFoil, but with a graphical user interface instead of a terminal interface. JavaFoil will also be applied in some of Clarkson's courses.
This is the 3D expansion of the XFoil computational engine. It applies XFoil's 2D flow analysis tools to wings and planes of all shapes and sizes. It can show streamlines, force vectors, and compute many other valuable parameters in a short amount of time.
Tornado is an inviscid wing analysis tool with built-in design and post-processing features. The user can build any trapezoidal wing geometry imaginable and analyze it, to a certain degree of accuracy, within seconds. A Clarkson student recently published a modified version of Tornado, dubbed Outbreak due to its capability of assessing thousands of wings in rapid succession. Both Tornado and Outbreak have many post-processing tools, including spanwise loading plots and coefficient outputs.
MATLAB is the high-level language and interactive environment used by millions of engineers and scientists worldwide. It lets you explore and visualize ideas, and collaborate across disciplines. Applications include, but are not limited to, signal and image processing, communications, control systems, and computational finance. MATLAB is discounted to students for $100. This license should not expire while you are a student.
Autodesk AutoCAD is a popular computer-aided design (CAD) tool used by students and industries across the world. A student license is free, and Clarkson provides courses to help teach students how to use this software for any purpose.
Solidworks is another popular CAD software that is especially useful when designing smaller components of systems. Clarkson provides licenses for Solidworks to at least the students who are required to use it.
RefWorks is an online bibliography tool that is free for Clarkson students to use. This software helps students to compile citations of all sorts into an online, shareable reference database. There is also a RefWorks plugin for Microsoft WORD that automatically inserts citations and build bibliographies in dozens of different citation formats.
© Joshua Wheeler