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Balancing Rotating Machinery with Wolfram SystemModeler

Explore the contents of this article with a free Wolfram SystemModeler trial. One of the most common causes for vibrations in mechanical systems is imbalance in the rotating parts of a machine. Much effort has therefore gone into developing methods and devices for balancing rotating machines. Balance is a requirement for many types of rotating machinery, such as electric motors, pumps, fans, turbines, generators, centrifugal compressors, and propellers. Many people know about the balance of their car wheels. If these systems are not properly balanced, the vibration will cause not only reduced efficiency and component fatigue but also disturbances for the environment, such as vibration and noise. The most common methods for balancing rotating machinery are the influence coefficient method and the modal balancing method. The car wheel balancing is, for instance, a subpart of the influence coefficient method. Wolfram SystemModeler is used for modeling the rotor, and the Wolfram Language for the evaluation of the results. The workflow shows how powerful it is to combine these two softwares. A disc with mass m is mounted on a shaft with stiffness k. The rotor rotates with the angular velocity W. The disc has an imbalance u. The unit for the imbalance is kg*m.
Håkan Wettergren, Applications Engineer, SystemModeler (MathCore)
Computation & Analysis

Profiling the Eyes: ϕaithful or ROTen? Or Both?

An investigation of the golden ratio's appearance in the position of human faces in paintings and photographs.
There is a vast amount of literature on the appearance of the golden ratio in nature, in physiology and psychology, and in human artifacts (see this page on the golden ratio; these articles on the golden ratio in art, in nature, and in the human body; and this paper on the structure of the creative process in science and art). In the past thirty years, there has been increasing skepticism about the prevalence of the golden ratio in these domains. Earlier studies have been revisited or redone. See, for example, Foutakis, Markowsky on Greek temples, Foster et al., Holland, Benjafield, and Svobodova et al. for human physiology. In my last blog, I analyzed the aspect ratios of more than one million old and new paintings. Based on psychological experiments from the second half of the nineteenth century, especially by Fechner in the 1870s, one would expect many paintings to have a height-to-width ratio equal to the golden ratio or its inverse. But the large sets of paintings analyzed did not confirm such a conjecture. While we did not find the expected prevalence of the golden ratio in external measurements of paintings, maybe looking "inside" will show signs of the golden ratio (or its inverse)? In today's blog, we will analyze collections of paintings, photographs, and magazine covers that feature human faces. We will also analyze where human faces appear in a few selected movies.
Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Education & Academic

Academy Award-Winning Interstellar Visuals Prototyped with the Wolfram Language

Kip Thorne, physicist, New York Times bestselling author, and professor emeritus at Caltech, ignited fans' passion for science through his work on the movie Interstellar. The sci-fi adventure won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and the first cuts of some of those stunning visuals were created with Mathematica and the Wolfram Language. "Mathematica was my way of testing whether or not I had the equations right," says Thorne, whose computational approach to producing images led to publication in the American Journal of Physics and Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Emily Suess, Technical Writer, Technical Communications and Strategy Group
Education & Academic

Engaged Students, Happy Teachers with Wolfram Programming Lab

For the last few days, we've been discussing Wolfram Programming Lab and how it is a tool for those teachers looking to incorporate coding into their computational classrooms. Today is the last day of the series, and I'm going to talk about the experiences I've had with Programming Lab. What I've seen from numerous workshops is that adopting a computational thinking approach increases engagement and supports creativity in the classroom. Having an engaged classroom is paramount; otherwise, teachers risk students falling into a dangerous spiral of disinterest that prevents them from learning and is likely to cause classroom management problems. Programming Lab gives teachers the ammunition to fight boredom and create exciting lesson plans. My colleague Ishwarya and I have been visiting elementary, middle, and high schools for the past couple of years to teach workshops of various lengths. It's been such a help to have the Wolfram Language in the cloud. Without downloading any software, students are able to go to a website and start programming immediately. I usually start off my workshops with the Getting Started and Draw a Sphere Explorations. Here are some of the kids that I've worked with in the past year or so:
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Education & Academic

An Elementary Introduction to Wolfram Programming Lab: There Is More Than Just Explorations

I hope you're enjoying the Wolfram Programming Lab series. Today I will be sharing more classroom experiences using Programming Lab and what it makes possible. I will also describe the resources available to interested educators. So let's get started! One of the local middle schools here in Champaign-Urbana conducts a community enrichment program for its students. When we heard about this, we knew that we wanted to participate and continue investing in our local community and school districts. So I've been working with a group of sixth graders for the past few weeks. One of my favorite things about Programming Lab is that it can be accessed directly from a web browser, making workshops run smoothly without needing to download software. Once students create a free account in Programming Lab, all their work is automatically saved and they can always go back to it. And some always do! I love it when students come up to me and say they tried to do something and it worked, or ask for my help when it didn't. Both of these feel awesome, as every teacher knows.
Ishwarya Vardhani, Education Partnerships Manager, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Support Computational Thinking for the Entire Curriculum

Today is the second post in our Wolfram Programming Lab series, and I'll be highlighting how the Wolfram Language supports the development of computational thinking skills for almost any subject matter. Students solidify concepts and practices by making connections to all of their subjects, not just a few here and there. By incorporating computational thinking across the curriculum, teachers give their students an opportunity to develop twenty-first-century skills to automate processes and solve messy problems with real-world data. In this blog post, I'll take a look at several Explorations in Wolfram Programming Lab to show the possibilities of programming in the Wolfram Language.
Adriana Rose, Business Development, Partnerships
Education & Academic

Bringing Wolfram Programming Lab into the Classroom

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts on experiencing Wolfram Programming Lab. In this series, my colleague and I will share our thoughts on using Wolfram Programming Lab as a tool to develop a computational thinking mindset in students. Modern industry has recognized a serious lack of problem solving and critical thinking in recent graduates. In a world going digital, there is an ever-increasing demand for a curriculum that is current and equips students with skills they need to succeed outside the classroom. Adding a computational thinking approach in the classroom addresses these issues. With Wolfram Programming Lab, injecting computational thinking activities to support the curriculum has never been easier. In fact, with the tools and methods we are going to describe in this series, it is possible to do this across a wide range of subjects, not just math and computer science. Wolfram Programming Lab is an immersive programming environment that is also fun! You can run Programming Lab through a web browser as well as on desktop systems. It is compatible on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Though Wolfram Programming Lab officially released earlier this year, the education folks here at Wolfram have been using it for a while now. Apart from constantly adding and tweaking content, we have been very busy conducting workshops in schools and libraries in Champaign-Urbana and nearby cities. Today I'll discuss experiences from two workshops that I led using Wolfram Programming Lab.
Ishwarya Vardhani, Education Partnerships Manager, Partnerships
Announcements & Events

Mathematica Online Now in Full Release

If you have recently visited Mathematica Online, the cloud version of our flagship software, you may have noticed something missing. That's right---we dropped the "BETA" tag, and I am pleased to announce that we have a product we can proudly call release ready. It has been a long road from when we debuted the Wolfram Cloud to where we are today; we have made some really great progress toward bringing to the cloud the kind of experience you are used to on the desktop---and enabling you to seamlessly work and share documents across your desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. One of the benefits of developing software in the cloud is the ability to constantly make updates and improvements, and every couple of weeks we have been able to add updates to deliver increased speed, increased stability, and increased usability. Regular users have probably noticed and been pleasantly surprised, I hope, by all that we have been doing to upgrade the cloud, but for those of you who haven't dropped by in a while, let me tell you a little more about some of those improvements.
Andrew de Laix, Director of Distributed Systems Engineering
Education & Academic

On the Detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO

Earlier today at a press conference held at the National Science Foundation headquarters in Washington, DC, it was announced that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed the first detection of a gravitational wave. The image reproduced below shows the signal read off from the Hanford, Washington, LIGO installation. The same signal could be seen in the data from the Livingston, Louisiana, site as well. While this signal may not seem like much, it is one of the most important scientific discoveries of our lifetime.

B. P. Abbott et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102 (2016)

Jason Grigsby, Wolfram Technology Engineer, Wolfram Technology Group
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