Interactive Engineering Tutorials

What’s hard fun in structural engineering? This semester, my students found out. I introduced parametric modelling into my concrete structures course at Faculty of Civil Engineering CTU in Prague – not only as an extra skill, but as a way to see how structures behave. Using Rhino Grasshopper + Karamba3D, students explored live structural responses to geometric changes – and learned through doing, observing, and yes... debugging. 👷 What did they actually do? 👉 Built a parametric model of a concrete wall 👉 Studied how structural response evolved as they explored various geometric scenarios – from shifting elements to adjusting loads and support conditions 👉 Exported their model into IDEA StatiCa Detail to perform a nonlinear code-check using CSFM 👉 Some even created animations showing how internal forces evolve in real time, or plotted curves illustrating how displacements or maximum stresses change with varying input parameters like column position 🎥 I prepared: 👉 Academic licenses 👉 Full installation & starter guide 👉 11 tutorial videos covering everything step by step 👉 Support for the Rhino → IDEA StatiCa Detail workflow 📊 And the results? Out of 40 students, 31 responded to an anonymous survey: ⭐ Average rating: 8.55 / 10 🔝 90% gave a score of 8 or higher Students appreciated: ✅ Working with modern tools ✅ Visual & interactive understanding of structural behaviour ✅ Logic-based “programmer mindset” ✅ Feeling of relevance to real-world engineering ✅ That it was mandatory – otherwise many wouldn't have dared to try 💬 A few quotes from the feedback: “It was the most fun part of the course – challenging but satisfying.” “At first I was terrified by all those wires… but in the end, I was proud of what I built.” “It wasn’t just following steps – we had to figure out what actually makes the model work.” “I didn’t expect to enjoy it – but it gave me a new way of thinking about structures.” 💡 What I learned: Parametric tools are not just about design freedom – they can transform structural education. They open the door to a new kind of learning: hard fun 🧠✨. 🔍 How about you? Do you use a parametric approach in structural engineering education or practice? 🙏 Thanks go to: Karamba3D, Matthew Tam, Clemens Preisinger – for generously providing academic seats and support Robert McNeel and Associates (TLM, Inc) – for their licensing policy and support for education IDEA StatiCa, Pavel Kaláb, Tomas Oupic Svoboda, Lukáš Juříček – for bringing CSFM into the classroom Lukas Vrablik and prof. Štemberk for the trust and opportunity to try something new in our course Cademy, Aman Agrawal – for teaching me advanced Grasshopper techniques ✨ Sources of inspiration: Krzysztof Wojslaw, Arturo Tedeschi, Arturo De La Fuente, Dr. Milad Showkatbakhsh, Jaroslav Baron, Petr Vacek, Gediminas Kirdeikis, Philippe Block, Peter Debney 🎓 Some of my great thesis pioneers on this topic: Evgenij Bogdanovič, Jan Chmelík, Michal Straka, Durdona Qurbonova

Building your own Python scripts for structural analysis makes sense in two scenarios: 1️⃣ When you need to do a simple analysis and firing up a software programme feels like overkill. 2️⃣ When you need to do a complex analysis and fine control over every aspect of the analysis is critical. Our latest tutorial on EngineeringSkills falls into the first bucket. In this one, we build a script to analyse continuous beams using OpenSeesPy. This is a great starter project for anyone interested in getting started with OpenSeesPy. We parameterise the beam and loading (and include optional hinges) making it a great utility script for future projects. These indeterminate beams are so common that it makes sense to have a script in our toolbox to very quickly generate the shear force diagram, bending moment diagram, reactions and deflection shape. Analysing them by hand takes forever and even setting them up for analysis in commercial software packages can feel laborious. This is where having a simple analysis script comes in handy - quickly plug in the beam parameters, hit Run and you’re done! If you’re a student engineer, having a calculator to check your results against, after each exercise, is a great way of validating your work. It also allows you to generate infinite exercise questions to practice on. 📂 There’s a full video tutorial to go with this tutorial - linked below. You can also download the complete Jupyter Notebook over on the tutorial page on EngineeringSkills. #CivilEngineering #StructuralEngineering #EngineeringSkills #Python #OpenSees #OpenSeesPy #StructuralAnalysis

Siemens HMI Design Masterclass: All TIA Portal WinCC Elements Explained 📺 Complete Guide to Siemens Comfort HMI Elements! Ready to level up your HMI design skills? In this video, we dive deep into every single element available in Siemens Comfort HMI — from input/output fields to graphical indicators, bar graphs, sliders, clocks, symbolic I/Os, and more! You’ll learn: 🔹 How to assign tags (real, integer, boolean) 🔹 Use of display formats — leading zeros, sign indication (+/-) 🔹 Setting upper/lower limits with color alerts 🔹 Making your HMI interactive with animations & events (activate, deactivate, input finish) 🔹 How to configure buttons, symbolic I/Os, bar graphs, and more 🔹 Using graphical IO and symbol libraries for sleek UI 🔹 Working with real-time clocks, gauges, sliders & HMI-exclusive features 🔹 Practical tips for layout, appearance, and user access control 💡 Whether you're new to TIA Portal or want to polish your existing skills, this walkthrough is packed with hands-on examples and practical use cases that’ll help you build better, smarter HMI screens. 🎯 This isn't just theory — I walk you through everything step-by-step, with simulations and explanations so you don’t miss a thing. 👇 Got a favorite HMI element? Or stuck somewhere in your design? Drop a comment below and let’s discuss! Want the full project file? Just comment “Project” and I’ll send it your way. #SiemensHMI #TIA_Portal #PLCProgramming #AutomationEngineering #HMI_Tutorial

Your simulation just crashed again. 💥😤 The solver left you one message: "Element has negative Jacobian at integration point." You have no idea what that means. You remesh. You rerun. You go to bed angry. 😤 Here's what actually happened 👇 Every FEM element secretly lives in two worlds. Your mesh has some weird squished shape — but the solver always works on a perfect reference element internally (a square, cube, triangle, tet — whatever matches your element type). The Jacobian matrix J is the bridge between the two. It tracks how that perfect reference shape stretches and rotates into your physical element. Its determinant det(J) is ONE number that decides everything: ✅ det(J) > 0 → valid element, integration works ⚠️ det(J) = 0 → element collapsed — zero area/volume, singular mapping 💀 det(J) < 0 → element is inside-out When det(J) flips negative, the stiffness integral flips sign too. Your element starts contributing negative stiffness to the global matrix. The solver tries to factorize something that's no longer positive definite — and dies. 🔥 One flipped element. One sign flip. Entire simulation gone. The article has two interactive tools to make this click 👇 🟦 2D interactive — drag the corners of a physical element and watch the two Jacobian tangent vectors update live. See the parallelogram they span, the exact J matrix entries, and det(J) flip from green to red the moment the element inverts. It's the clearest way to see what J actually is. 🧱 3D interactive — a full 3D brick mesh you can warp with sliders. Every element is colored by its det(J) in real time. Click any element to isolate it, inspect its full 3×3 J matrix, and see exactly why it's valid, near-collapsed, or inverted. Link🔗👉 https://lnkd.in/ddMPB2h3 #engineering #mechanicalengineering #simulation #FEM #FEA #finiteelements #ANSYS #Abaqus #CAE #computational #mesh #meshing #structuralengineering #mathematics #linearalgebra #tech #learning

Sharing a simulation we developed for LearnCheme to help teach undergraduate fluid mechanics. The idea behind these tools is to give students an easy-to-use, interactive platform to visualize concepts that may not be immediately obvious from equations alone. Thanks to National Science Foundation (NSF), IUSE grant for funding. The work is being done at University of Colorado Boulder Chemical and Biological Engineering University of Colorado Boulder College of Engineering & Applied Science. This interactive simulation helps students visualize the differential form of the continuity equation by computing flow rates around a movable control volume. It shows how inflow and outflow balance for divergence-free velocity fields, and how this balance breaks down when the velocity field has nonzero divergence. Link to simulation: https://lnkd.in/g_vKkYTu Other digital simulations for fluids: https://lnkd.in/gHu7GEWY General chemical engineering resources: https://learncheme.com/

𝐆𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢 𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐯𝐚𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐦𝐞 𝐚 "𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐱 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐞𝐫" https://lnkd.in/eGppX4Xi In this short video, I share a demo using 𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘎𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘪 𝘊𝘢𝘯𝘷𝖺𝗌 to make interactive visualizations showing 2D linear transformations, which can replace a lengthy Python script we were using for a linear algebra lesson. The idea is that students can instantly see the effects of different matrices—rotation, shear, scaling, and more—by simply adjusting values in an AI-created app. I still think engineering students need to have proficiency in computing things with vectors and matrices, e.g., using NumPy arrays to effectively apply linear algebra in engineering contexts. So, yes, we want them to work with raw code, too. But if the goal is to make abstract mathematical ideas tangible and engaging, the web app created by 𝘎𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘪 provides that in one prompt. #AIinEducation #LinearAlgebra #STEM #EdTech