"I find it hard to refer to a specific feature, but the ability to transition between real and imaginary numbers without operator intervention is one of the more powerful things I appreciate," Alheid said. "Plus the ability to accurately solve, symbolically, complex algebra problems is another tremendous feature." Alheid calls Mathematica the "chain saw of engineering." He says, "I have cut through problems, in a matter of hours with Mathematica, that we had labored for months trying to obtain solutions with handwritten equations."

Mathematica Gets Slick with Rebuild of Paper Machine

Stop by any newsstand and you'll see hundreds of glossy magazines. Did you ever stop to think how those pages got so shiny? Well, Robert Alheid, Chief Engineer of Design at Beloit Corporation, has. Alheid works on the machine that adds the shiny coating to paper. Called an Off Machine Coater, this machine can coat about 400 to 500 tons of magazine paper per day. That is enough paper to make about one million 100-page magazines per day.

Using Mathematica, Mr. Alheid spent many hours analyzing the drives for these machines. On a recent rebuild, Alheid calculated the system transfer functions on the machine's drive circuits; this system included three new digital drive sections and five old analog drive sections, plus 32 new helper drives. The stability analysis of six new tension-regulating circuits was also done using Mathematica.

"The elastic, mechanical system response is the most difficult part of this control loop to calculate," Alheid said. "Mathematica handles these large equations with ease, and allows me to directly solve for a controller with the required bandwidth."

Key features of Mathematica used:

• Numeric
• Symbolic
• Graphic
• Notebook