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Summary: Abbreviated Version to Appear in ASCE
Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
STRUCTURAL MATRIX COMPUTATIONS WITH
UNITS : DATA STRUCTURES, ALGORITHMS,
AND SCRIPTING LANGUAGE DESIGN
By Mark A. Austin,1
Wane-Jang Lin2
and Xiaoguang G. Chen3
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 uninten-
tional 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 calculations. Aladdin employs a novel combination of system
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