Overview

This chapter introduces readers to MATLAB, either as a gentle beginning or as a refresher of specific properties and operations. Your book should include a CD containing a self-study MATLAB tutorial with more depth and practice than can be provided here. If you did not receive a CD with your book, if you need a replacement, or if you want to be sure you have the most recent files, go to www.scitechpub.com/lonngren2e.htm. Meanwhile, this chapter provides a convenient application of MATLAB and review of vectors to our study of electromagnetics.

MATLAB, widely used in engineering studies and industry, is a software tool that allows you to obtain visual images easily of various electromagnetic phenomena that we will soon encounter. Also, vectors, which are so crucial in describing electromagnetic phenomena, can be easily manipulated using MATLAB. Numerous figures in this text have been created using MATLAB, as can be seen by the MATLAB icon beside them. For simplicity, we will emphasize Cartesian coordinates in this review. The vector operations in other coordinate systems are included in Appendix A. Our motivation in employing vectors is that electromagnetic fields are vector quantities and their use will permit us to use a fairly compact notation to represent sets of partial differential equations. This review will include a presentation of the vector differential operations of the gradient, divergence, and curl. The transformation of a vector from one coordinate system to another will be discussed. It is often helpful to be able to transform a...