EM-Based MATLAB® Tutorial on CD

Dr. Randy Jost – Utah State University

 

GOAL: This MATLAB tutorial is designed for students with little or no exposure to MATLAB as they start a junior-level course in Electromagnetics.  It is ideally suited to the Lonngren/Savov text "Fundamentals of Electromagnetics with MATLAB" because 1) students can learn or review the fundamentals of MATLAB programming on their own, freeing up valuable class time so EM concepts can be covered more thoroughly, 2) allows the students to make more meaningful use of the extensive MATLAB examples, figures, and problem sets within the text and 3) gives the students the opportunity to practice using a common engineering software tool to reinforce EM concepts by developing their own MATLAB functions and toolboxes to solve problems in a “what-if” fashion.

 

APPROACH: The tutorial examples and exercises will be oriented toward solving EM-related problems, which can then be used to solve specific problems and examples in the text.  Each lesson will build upon preceding ones and introduce the student to additional capabilities of MATLAB.  Moreover, by the 8-10 week point, the student should able to do a simple project that integrates their classroom instruction in EM-related topics with their newly developed (or reviewed) capability to use MATLAB.  Thus, the tutorial will end with an example project, wherein the student can practice the step by step procedures necessary to carry out a simple trade-off analysis of an EM-based design problem.  This will result in the student reinforcing both the EM knowledge and MATLAB skills the student has acquired during the course of his study and demonstrates the ability to use MATLAB to solve a multi-step EM problem.

 

FORMAT: The CD will contain the tutorial documentation in a PDF format, as well as MS Word and the associated MATLAB code.  This material can be studied independently of the text and even independently of MATLAB, but ideally the student will be running MATLAB on his/her computer while proceeding through the tutorial.  This will allow the student to reinforce the concepts they have read about and get immediate feedback as to whether they have successfully learned the concept they have recently covered.

 

 

 

Outline of Lessons

 

Lesson 0: Introduction to MATLAB®

            Starting MATLAB

            The Basic MATLAB User Interface

            Basic Calculation

            Built in Functions

            Exercises

 

Lesson 1: Working with Numbers: Scalars and Vectors

            Scalar Input

            Scalar Operations

            Using Built-in Functions

            Vector Input

            Vector Operations

            Exercises

 

Lesson 2: Working with Complex Numbers

            Operations on Complex Numbers

            Complex Number Functions

            Exercises

 

Lesson 3: MATLAB Programming I – M-Files

            Developing Basic M-Files

            Exercises

 

Lesson 4: Working with Equations

            Built-in Functions

            Equation Solving

            Exercises

 

Lesson 5: MATLAB Output

            Plotting

            Formatting Output

            Exercises

 

Lesson 6: Working with Matrices

            Matrix Input

            Matrix Operations

            Exercises

 

Lesson 7: MATLAB Programming II – Program Flow & Control

            Programming Constructs in MATLAB

            Exercises

 

Lesson 8: Modifying MATLAB

            Writing your own MATLAB Functions

            Special Functions in MATLAB

            Exercises

 

Lesson 9: Advanced MATLAB Input/Output

            Reading from Files

            Writing to Files

            Importing/Exporting Data

            Exercises

 

Lesson 10: The MATLAB Graphical User Interface

            Developing a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI)

            GUI Input

            Program Output

            Exercises

 

A MATLAB Project: Putting it all together