What does mean the Linearization Delta in the block mechanism configuration of the simmechanics library

I was wondering what the linearization delta was for in the block mechanism configuration of simulink. Have anyone a more extensive explanation as the one given in the help browser ?

Answer 1

[Sebastian Castro]

From the documentation: Perturbation value for computing numerical partial derivatives during linearization. The default value is 0.001.

Linearization is basically a way of finding the slope of a function. Many Simulink blocks have pre-programmed slopes -- for example, we can easily know that the slope of a Sine block is a cosine function. We call this approach analytical linearization.

When a block does not have an analytical slope, Simulink will use a numerical approach. Here, the gradients are approximated by sampling a few values near an operating point and computing the slope between those values. The linearization delta therefore denotes how far from the operating point your numerical linearization algorithm searches when it looks at SimMechanics blocks.

You can also refer to the "Perturbation of Individual Blocks" section here.

- Sebastian