Maple 12 delivers major innovations in engineering analysis and design

Adept Scientific plc (Letchworth, Herts), announces the latest edition of Maplesoft’s™ (Waterloo, Canada ) ground breaking engineering software with an extensive new feature set.

Maplesoft™, the leading provider of high-performance software tools for engineering, science and mathematics, has just announced the next release of Maple™, the Company’s hugely popular tool for solving complex mathematical problems and creating rich technical documents. Maple is already an industry standard tool in engineering and scientific circles. Maple 12 introduces an extensive range of new tools built on Maple’s fundamental technology platform of smart documents, powerful mathematics and seamless connectivity to the engineering design toolchain.

One of the most significant features of this release is the direct connectivity between Maple 12 and popular CAD systems such as SolidWorks® and Autodesk® Inventor™. CAD users will now be able to deploy powerful mathematical capabilities to dramatically extend the range of analysis on CAD models. Based on major industry trends and extensive consultation with its user base, the product also offers new ways to develop sophisticated mathematical models faster and more accurately than ever before. A new collection of Dynamic Systems modelling tools, essential in dynamic modelling, control design and signal processing, is yet another important addition to the new release. These tools will add convenient frequency domain analysis, state space analysis and more to Maple’s already extensive mathematical tool set.

“Maple 12 offers a bold new set of features to dramatically extend the analytical reach of engineers. Many of the new features truly break new ground and set the stage for great levels of analytical productivity,” said Jim Cooper, CEO of Maplesoft. “I am confident that Maple 12 will spark greater creativity, efficiency and effectiveness in design and analysis.”

Pilot users of Maple 12 have responded positively. “Changes in Maple 12 have made it much easier for me to program big calculations. Once I understood the efficacy of this method my code became not only faster but much easier to read and understand,” said Dr. Marvin Weinstein, Theoretical Physicist at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Major new features of Maple 12 include:

Connectivity to CAD systems and the engineering workflow

• In addition to the groundbreaking ability to connect Maple 12 and popular CAD systems directly, users are now able to deploy powerful mathematical capabilities to dramatically extend the range of analysis on CAD models. In addition, Maple 12’s knowledge-documentation tools allow engineers to tag designs electronically with rich technical documentation and calculations. As a result design calculations are integrated seamlessly into the overall engineering workflow.
• Additional connectivity innovations include MATLAB® code import and translation to enable the easy migration of legacy code to new Maple documents and database connectivity to allow Maple 12 applications to directly access external datasets stored in popular SQL databases.

New Analysis Tools

• The new Dynamic Systems package offers a large selection of analytic and graphing tools for linear time-invariant systems which are essential in control systems development.
• New Wavelets support provides easy access to the most powerful suite of wavelet tools in any general-purpose computation package. Wavelet analysis is an important technique in key areas such as image compression and image and signal analysis, complementing classical techniques such as FFT.
• New plotting capabilities dramatically simplify the creation of complex engineering plots. New plot types include dual axis plots, polar plots and specialised engineering plots such as frequency domain responses and root-locus plots.
• Major enhancements to the differential equation and differential-algebraic equation (DAE) solvers strengthen Maple’s world-leading position in this critical area.

Smarter Documents

Maple’s exclusive smart document technology is greatly enhanced with a range of new features. Performing even the most complex mathematical task or creating the most sophisticated technical application is easier than ever.

• Improvements to customisable interactive components: users now have a greater choice in buttons, controls and other interface tools. In addition, the new Exploration Assistant allows users to create interactive mini-applications to explore the parameters of their expressions instantly.
• Code editor: for advanced users who develop custom code, Maple 12 includes tools that make Maple scripts and procedures easier to write. The code editor makes the creation of any advanced application faster; the final result is easily distributed, attractive and easy to use.
• “Clickable” enhancements: Maple has received rave reviews for its “clickable” approach to maths which uses mouse clicks, menus, palettes and more, instead of the conventional command-line approach still in use by many systems. Maple 12 offers a wide range of improvements that enhance the overall usability of the system.

About Maplesoft

Maplesoft is the leading provider of high-performance software tools for engineering, science and mathematics. Its product suite reflects the philosophy that given great tools, people can do great things. Maplesoft has transformed the way engineers, scientists and mathematicians use maths enabling them to work better, faster and smarter.

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world's leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.