Abstract

Despite the well known benefits of physical units, matrices, and matrix algebra in engineering computations, most engineering analysis packages are essentially dimensionless. They simply hold the engineer responsible for selecting a set of engineering units and making sure their use is consistent. While this practice may be satisfactory for the solution of self-contained and well established problem solving procedures, where the structure of the output is well known and understood, identifying and correcting unintentional errors in the solution of new and innovative computations can be significantly easier when units are an integral part of the computation procedure. This report begins with a description of the data structures and algorithms needed to represent and manipulate physical quantity variables, and matrices of physical quantities. The second half of this report focuses on the implementation of Aladdin, a new computational environment for matrix and finite element calculatio...

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