Engineering is application of scientific principles in real life problem solving, or in other words solving practical problems with application of accumulated scientific facts and more or less personal experience. Solving engineering problems often means application of numerical methods for differential equation solving, no matter what engineering branch is in concern. With fast development of personal computers in last two decades of last century, numerical methods moved from mainframe computers in research centers to widely available program packages written for PCs. This transition resulted in development of tools for product design, modeling and simulation which now could be used at universities for education as well as scientific work. MATLAB® is dominant commercial package today, but also there is number of free packages like Scilab or Octave. This work focuses on comparison of free software packages with commercial reference to determine their fitness to be used as tool for modeling and simulation as well as teaching engineering principles.

Prehrambena tehnologija