Gain insights into using Python for mechanical and aerospace engineering. Learn about basics, graphing techniques, airfoil plotting, and dynamic pressure and orbital modeling in 2D and 3D.

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In this course, you will learn about the Python programming language in the context of mechanical and aerospace engineering. 

You will start with the basics of Python, like variables, collections, and different types of loops. Once you have the basics out of the way, the real fun begins. You will learn how to: graph thrust available and thrust required, graph dynamic pressure during a rocket launch, and how to plot airfoil coordinates. 

Towards the end, you will get a strong overview of orbital parameters and learn how to model both 2D and 3D static orbits. Once you’ve completed this course, you will have a better understanding of Python and how it works in the context of mechanical/aerospace engineering.

Python for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

# Material properties

You used `Requests` earlier to scrape a website and do something with the results. That website functioned more like an API because you knew exactly what format the website would return. Having the data nicely formatted does not always happen. Sometimes, you have to find and format, clean, or otherwise manipulate the data ourselves. When you scrape a real website, you will need to be able to parse through HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to get the information that you want. On any webpage that you visit, HTML and its sister Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are hard at work to display the design of the particular webpage. The Engineering Toolbox website [1] contains technical data, material properties, chemical properties,  economic information, drawing tools, and so much more for all types of engineers. You will make a Python program to grab information related to the material properties of different aluminium alloys from the Engineering Toolbox website. The program will put this information into an Excel spreadsheet so you can reference it later. `BeautifulSoup4` is the preferred library for HTML parsing. The documentation for `BeautifulSoup` [2] is very good. `Openpyxl` is the preferred cross-platform library for manipulating Excel spreadsheets; `Openpyxl`’s documentation can be found under footnote [3]. 

The program will need to go to the material properties page [4], convert the table into a nested `list` so the information is easily parse-able, and iterate through the info to put each value into a cell in an Excel spreadsheet.

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# About HTML

Introduce the reader to aluminum material properties, web scraping, and saving data to an Excel file.

Getting Comfortable with Python

FizzBuzz

Graphing Thrust Available and Thrust Required

Graphing Dynamic Pressure During a Rocket Launch

Getting and Plotting Airfoil Coordinates

Modeling a 2-Body Orbit in 2D and 3D

Unit Conversions

Introduction to Web Scraping

Modeling Camera Shutter Effect

Writing Reports with Pweave

The End

Introduction to Material Properties

Material properties