The engineers and programmers at Maplesoft announced Maple Flow as a tool to “brainstorm, develop, and document” projects and analysis. The new tool is built around Maple math software, but the Flow product offers designers a whiteboard-like visual interface that will retain information and perform calculations.
Maplesoft describes its Maple Flow software as a live paper, where elements can be moved anywhere on the workspace for evaluation. “Containers” that hold numbers, variables or straight text can be dragged and moved around the workspace. Evaluation occurs in a specific order, starting at the upper left and moving to the right, and then down row by row.
The sheet automatically recalculates itself, so if you work out a few equations using one value of x and then change it later, all the calculations will change. I’ve personally always had better luck making another variable and calling it x2 or a different name, so that both the original and final variables and their results are retained. The Maple Flow workspace is built to help users cleanly share their ideas with an easy interface.
Although Maple Flow is billed as a scratchpad harnessing the power of Maplesoft’s math engine rather than a programming language, it still allows you to document calculations and write notes with the option to make them visible or hidden. This is welcome as a feature when showing your audience the inputs that feed into a calculation, but it can also help when you’re coming back to a worksheet you haven’t dealt with for a stretch of time—say, months, or even years.
One of the things that I try to hammer into my students’ minds is that the future you is also a customer of your work. We’re all aging and our memories become more faulty over time, so any documentation we can build into a report will help to remind us in the future of the thought process behind a design decision.
More than anything, Maple Flow as a tool feels like 2010 Mathcad to me, and that comparison has likely come up in the past because Maplesoft has at least one article ready discussing similarities between the two software and why Maple Flow is ultimately better.
Taking the Software for a Test Drive
Anyone can download an evaluation copy of Maple Flow, though the tool requires you to first download the baseline software to function. After downloading and installing the software, I started working through a robust tutorial system with headings, including entering and evaluating math, functions, matrices, units and plotting.
Another nice feature in the Maple Flow system is the start page, where users can choose to start a new canvas (worksheet), work through the tutorials, or see some of the projects that developers and customers have already built. When a user chooses to make their own new canvas, the familiar ribbon interface makes sheet creation feel simple. In the left margin are several palettes with preconstructed tools to help users construct their projects.
The Expression section contains easy templates to build number constructs like:
- Fractions
- Exponents
- Radicals
- Functions
- Exponential functions
- Absolute values
- Summations
- Derivatives
- Integrals
The Matrix section lets users customize the number of rows and columns while choosing the shape and data type of their matrix. This creates a blank matrix of the specified size where users can click to enter each element of data. There are also options to create a matrix in the worksheet itself.
The Units section has subheadings of the base units, in different systems and scales, like:
- Length
- Time
- Mass
Additional subheadings get more specialized and obscure, from volume force and mass to headings like luminous flux and electric dipole moments. One benefit to having units built into a system is that there is the additional safeguard in showing you possible errors in a calculation. If you’re expecting units of Newtons but instead find a result of kilograms squared per second, you know that there’s a fundamental piece of your calculation missing or mislabeled.
Finally, the Greek palette has upper and lowercase Greek letters to give flexibility in displaying variables and results.
Internal Examples and Customer Case Studies
Example worksheets exist in the software for several different engineering disciplines, chemistry and signal processing.
My favorite example is titled “Highway Pavement Design using the CALTRANS method.” After a short explanation of some California highway terms and variables, the worksheet shows how the traffic use data, vehicle loads and R-values of different materials can be used to calculate a minimum required recommended thickness for flexible pavement. As with all the examples in the software, the flow of information is clearly and cleanly presented.
On the Maple Flow website, a huge case study is shown revolving around pipeline analysis and design. Sections show how the software is used in design codes for pressure piping, pressure losses, flow rates, economic calculations, orifice meter sizing, thermodynamics and deflection of buried pipes. Several applications are available to download. Each of these examples is a fully developed worksheet, enabling users to input variables and find solutions.
The company also offers the Maple Viewer, so users without a Maple license can view and interact with the worksheets. This is a nice feature for presentations during meetings and videoconferencing, so that everyone on a call can interact with a worksheet in real time.
Maple Flow has a learning curve like any software, but the tutorials definitely help. The biggest frustrations when using worksheets like this is when you accidentally drag a container out of its calculation order, it no longer calculates; or when you move a variable off the screen and scramble the results of your work. When this happened during my evaluation of Maple Flow, a simple Undo command fixed the frustration, but I’m assuming there might also be some more elegant solutions.
The Next Tool in the Toolbox
Maple Flow is a great addition to the current stable of Maplesoft products, and with its release comes the new 2021 version of Maple itself. One of the most striking aspects of this software for me is the company’s strong commitment to ease of use coupled with quickly getting users comfortable with the software. The Resources page points users to Support, Help functions, resource centers for education or commercial applications, and user communities.
In addition to these resources, the company offers training online or at a customer’s site, and a long list of webinars and help videos can guide users in specific applications. The company also offers a full complement of examples and case studies.
With Maplesoft being a Canadian company, I would guess that the local pinnacle of all of these examples shows how the software helped the Olympic wheelchair curling contests. Beyond the improvements made for Team Canada, the case study shows that all Olympic teams might take on the new modeling dynamics built with the Maple software.
When engineers brainstorm solutions in a meeting and draw on a whiteboard or screen, their work is often lost or requires recreation in a math model. These living worksheets should help design engineers save time and, by extension, money. These new living worksheets are a solid tool for design engineers to quickly change variables like a spreadsheet. They also offer the flexibility to add images and links like a presentation document to communicate the work to others. Maple Flow is available now for evaluation or purchase.