QuickField Student

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 22, 2011

QuickField Professional is a Finite Element Analysis tool for creating and analyzing electromagnetic, thermal, and stress simulations. It's used in many science, physics, and design classrooms and labs. QuickField Student is a free version with reduced functionality and a limited number of nodes. It can simulate basic problems in engineering and physics as well as display QuickField models. It's a great choice for engineering and physics students who use QuickField at school. QuickField Student helps users familiarize themselves with the full program as well as letting them view materials at home.

QuickField Student opened with a welcome message declaring we'd soon see that "field simulations can be fun!" There's no doubting they can be cool. But fun? A trip to the Virtual Classroom helped get us started. It combines a standard Windows Help file with Flash animations. The Explorer-style interface resembles many engineering, mapping, and image editing tools and will be familiar to most Windows users.

Let's be clear: QuickField Student doesn't seem at all difficult to use, but it probably helps to have access to the full program, not to mention knowing a little bit about FEA, design, engineering, and simulations, to get the most out of it. If, like us, your physics knowledge doesn't extend much beyond a convincing demo of the principle of inertia (using only a common sofa) and broad respect for the law of gravity, QuickField Student probably isn't for you. But if you've gotten this far and have an orderly mind, you're clearly interested, so we'll tell you to go right to the Help menu and click Open Examples Folder. There you'll find many examples of the simulations, problems, and data sets found in QuickField Professional.

We were impressed with QuickField Student. Although it has capacity limitations, students can practice using many of the tools in the full version. Many other users might benefit from this free tool's capabilities, too. We're all in favor of educational software that puts advanced engineering tools in the hands of potential engineers around the world. That's QuickField Student's model.