The Student Room Group

Download student versions of popular engineering software packages

It recently occurred to me that many widely used software packages have student (read: limited) versions available for free. Your department almost certainly has the required software to complete your course on its computers, but you may either want the software on your own computer as well for ease of access, or want to get experience with a different package that may be commonly used in a sector you want to break into.

Here are some off the top of my head...

ANSYS:

http://www.ansys.com/Products/Academic/ANSYS-Student

ANSYS is probably best known for being an FEA package, but it also comes with a CFD function as well. Student version is limited to 32,000 nodes for FEA and 512,000 nodes for CFD, but that should be plenty for performing your coursework.

ABAQUS:

http://academy.3ds.com/software/simulia/abaqus-student-edition/

This is another FEA package. Quite popular in oil & gas, and no doubt used in many other industries too, as well as some universities. I think that Dassualt Systems (the makers of SolidWorks) have bought it, so that opens up some possibilities for integration.

MathCAD Express:

http://www.ptc.com/engineering-math-software/mathcad/free-download

This isn't strictly a student version, but it's (the Express version) free and very useful. It's essentially Microsoft Word but for maths. It does all of your calculations and handles all of your units (i.e. it can effortlessly deal with both metric and imperial units, and conversions within e.g. bar to psi to mm Hg).

All welcome to contribute. There are probably a lot of electrical, chemical, structural etc. software packages out there too.
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Usually your University would have licences for SolidWorks and Office.

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