All About Mathcad—
Q&A with Jim Heppelmann 

In April 2006, PTC completed its acquisition of Mathsoft Engineering and Education, Inc., a leader in the engineering calculation software market. With Mathsoft’s flagship product, Mathcad, PTC customers will be able to document and solve critical engineering calculations that are used throughout the product development process.  In this interview, PTC/USER’s Rick Snider talks with Jim Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer at PTC, about what Mathcad can do for Pro/ENGINEER users.

Rick Snider: Jim, can you give us your thoughts on why PTC’s acquisition of Mathsoft makes sense?

Jim Heppelmann: Sure, Rick. We believe this acquisition makes sense for a variety of reasons, the most important being that it helps solve a big problem faced by our traditional installed base of discrete manufacturing companies.  Our customers face mounting pressure to deliver better products faster and at a lower cost.  We have responded to this challenge by delivering industry-leading solutions that automate key product development processes.  Mathcad delivers predictive engineering capabilities which dramatically improve the product development process. 

Mathcad enables customers to simultaneously perform and document critical engineering calculations used throughout the product development process.  Mathcad uses natural math notation, combines text, math and graphics into a single worksheet environment, and has powerful units capabilities, which helps automate the documentation and verification of engineering calculations.  Also, with the integration of Pro/ENGINEER and Mathcad, PTC customers will soon be able to take advantage of new capabilities that help automate the upfront engineering process, which is typically disconnected, manual and error-prone.  By predicting the behavior of designs early in the process, customers can optimize designs faster and reduce the iterations downstream between the CAD modeling and design analysis and validation stages.

Getting better documentation, reuse and traceability of engineering calculations is a great opportunity for our stronghold industries of industrial equipment, electronics and high-tech, automotive, and aerospace and defense.   In addition to being a great fit for PTC’s existing discrete manufacturing customers, Mathcad expands PTC’s footprint in adjacent markets that need the same capabilities for critical engineering calculations. These would include civil engineering, oil & gas, and chemical processes industries.

RS:  What can Mathcad do (for the user) that the listed PTC CAE software could not?

JH:  The existing PTC CAE solutions are purpose-built for structural, thermal, and motion analysis and optimization of CAD models.  These products leverage advanced finite element analysis and simulation capabilities to evaluate the performance of designs.  The existing CAE products are typically used for downstream design analysis and validation, after the CAD model has been created.  Mathcad complements the existing Pro/ENGINEER CAE products by offering an intuitive, comprehensive, general purpose engineering calculation software solution that can be used early in the design process, before the CAD model is created.  Mathcad can help Pro/ENGINEER users predict the behavior of their products and thus reduce the number iterations they have typically experienced between CAD model and analysis.  Customers can also perform and document a variety of calculations that aren’t specifically tied to CAD parts or assemblies.

RS: Can you discuss the integration with Pro/ENGINEER? 

JH:  The Pro/ENGINEER and Mathcad integration helps PTC expand its computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) solutions with unique predictive engineering capabilities that help customers deliver optimized products more rapidly, with higher quality and improved knowledge capture.  

Pro/ENGINEER models are driven by parameters.  But what drives these parameters? How are they derived? What assumptions drive the design? Engineering calculations determine these parameter values, predicting the behavior of the design before the CAD modeling phase begins.   Mathcad captures this calculation information, all of the methods, equations, assumptions, data and units which then drive the CAD designs.  Integrating Pro/ENGINEER with Mathcad establishes upstream associativity between a CAD part or assembly and calculations documented and solved in Mathcad. 

The integration between Mathcad and Pro/ENGINEER is a bi-directional link between the two applications.  Users can easily associate any Mathcad worksheet with a Pro/ENGINEER part or assembly using the Analysis feature in Pro/ENGINEER.  Critical values calculated in Mathcad can be mapped to parameters and dimensions in the CAD model to drive the geometric design.  Parameters from a Pro/ENGINEER model can also be input into Mathcad for downstream engineering design calculations.  The integration offers dynamic updates to calculations and the CAD drawing when parameters are changed.  

The new integration that will be available in the Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 M030 maintenance release in August 2006 is the first formal product integration between Pro/ENGINEER and Mathcad.  Although PTC customers have purchased and used Mathcad as a stand-alone product, a seamless, easily accessible integration from the Pro/ENGINEER user interface did not exist previously.   

Customers currently using Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0 can download a toolkit-based application allowing them to integrate Mathcad and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0.  This less formal integration will enable the use of Mathcad parameters in Pro/ENGINEER models, and is expected to become available in July 2006. 

RS:  Why is this better than using the two products as stand-alone entities? 

JH: That’s a good question Rick.  Using the two products individually enables the user to perform and document critical engineering calculations associated with CAD files, but it does not offer the additional benefits of directly linking Pro/ENGINEER parts and assemblies with Mathcad worksheets. A bi-directional link improves productivity and design quality by automating the process which enables users to reduce errors from manually transferring dimensions and parameters between files, reduce time needed to update changes to parameters, verify that correct versions of the files are being used, and perform what-if analyses and instantly visualize results.

RS:  Can you elaborate on "predictive engineering"? 

JH:  “Predictive engineering” is a product development process capability and benefit enabled by using Mathcad early in the product design and development process.  Mathcad can be used to apply scientific and mathematical principles to engineering design problems at the beginning of the design process in order to determine the critical dimensions and parameters used downstream in the CAD model.   By calculating the parameters required and “predicting” the performance of the design up front, instead of guessing key dimensions and parameters, product designers can produce an optimized design more rapidly and with less iteration than the traditional methods used today.

An example of this is the transmission design problem which was demonstrated at the PTC/USER 2006 event in Dallas, TX.  A Mathcad worksheet was used to perform and document engineering calculations related to the dimensions and performance of a shaft in a power transmission system.  Based on the input horsepower, shaft speed and principal dimensions, Mathcad calculated the output shaft torque, speed, and bearing loads.  Mathcad was also used to determine the shaft wall thickness required to support specific torque and bending loads.  The resulting dimensions of the wall thickness were used in a Pro/ENGINEER CAD model and verified downstream by more advanced, but time-consuming FEA analysis.  Using this predictive engineering method to optimize the shaft wall thickness early in the process reduces the likelihood of the part failing to meet the performance requirements and reduces the time required for design iterations.

RS: Can you offer any additional information on how Mathcad will fit in with PTC's PDS system?

JH:  Adding Mathcad to PTC’s complete Product Development System, which today includes Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill, and Arbortext, delivers a solution that is unique to the industry.  PTC is currently in the midst of planning the roadmap for delivering Mathcad as an integral component of the PDS.  The first phase is being delivered in August 2006, with the integration between Mathcad and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 M030 as described above.  In Windchill, XML-based Mathcad documents can be captured, cross-referenced, configuration controlled, and reused.  This integration will enable users to maintain and manage the associativity between Mathcad and Pro/ENGINEER content.  Windchill also improves the ability to capture critical intellectual property (IP) contained in Mathcad worksheets, providing secure, centralized access so that others can share and reuse the valuable IP.

Detailed plans will be announced in the future.

For more information about Mathcad, please visit www.ptc.com/company/mathsoft