Python for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

an introduction to Python for mechanical and aerospace engineers & engineering students
by Alex Kenan
cover page

What is this book about?

MATLAB isn't the only tool you can use for engineering analysis! Learn Python with mechanical and aerospace engineering examples like:

  • Thrust available and thrust required for an aircraft
  • Dynamic pressure and how it changes with altitude and velocity
  • Plotting different airfoils
  • Orbital mechanics and orbital parameters
  • Mechanical properties of different aluminum alloys

In total, there are 10 chapters:

  1. Intro chapter on how to download Python via Anaconda distribution and getting started with Python syntax
  2. A small problem and solution to demonstrate a basic Python program
  3. Graphing thrust required and thrust available for an Airbus A321 at three different altitudes with Matplotlib
  4. Graphing dynamic pressure as a function of time for a rocket launch with Matplotlib
  5. Getting and plotting airfoil coordinates with Requests and Matplotlib
  6. Modeling a satellite’s orbit around Earth with PyAstronomy and Matplotlib
  7. Creating a GUI to convert units with Tkinter and Pint
  8. Introduction to web scraping (Requests and BeautifulSoup4) and exporting data to Excel (Openpyxl)
  9. Modeling camera shutter effect on an aircraft’s propeller with Tkinter and Numpy
  10. Making pdf reports of Python code with Pweave

The completed programs are available at the book's GitHub page.

Sample Chapter

Take a test drive of this book by previewing some of Chapter 5: Modeling a 2-body orbit in two and three dimensions here.

Praise for Python for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Quality material like this is scarce in the aerospace world and sorely needed

Each example incorporated real-time debugging and teaching coding problem solving as I went through them

Aerospace engineers will no doubt recognize many of the examples used from their time in college,
but other engineers will also find much value

This book is awesome and something I wish I’d had a few years ago

I've been teaching a small course to MAE students in my school's rocketry team based on the book,
and everyone's a huge fan

It has been very helpful to the point where I even use it in interviews
and I also refer to the book ... with my own projects


Creative Commons License

Python for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and its associated materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International License.