A POSSIBILISTIC APPROACH TO DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS-METHODS

Dimensional analysis methods reason about physical and technical processes without explicit knowledge of the underlying physical laws. Instead the methods require the values of the characteristic variables and their dimensional representation. This paper shows the possibility of generalising these methods by considering the physical quantities as fuzzy sets. The paper gives a theoretical justification for this, by formulating the basic principles of dimensional analysis in fuzzyfied form. Special attention is paid in the paper to dimensionless fuzzy quantities and contains the interval functions of some of these. The paper shows some examples concerning the fuzzy approach to problems solved by dimensional analysis methods.