Real world uses of hyperbolic trigonometric functions

I covered hyperbolic trigonometric functions in a recent maths course. However I was never presented with any reasons as to why (or even if) they are useful.

Is there any good examples of their uses outside academia?

If you take a rope, fix the two ends, and let it hang under the force of gravity, it will naturally form a hyperbolic cosine curve.

The catenary has been mentioned a number of times, but apparently not the corresponding surface of revolution, the catenoid. It and the plane are the only surfaces of revolution that have zero mean curvature (i.e. they are minimal surfaces). This surface is the form a soap bubble (approximately) takes when it is stretched across two rings:

(image from here)

On a map using the Mercator projection, the relationship between the latitude L of a point and its y coordinate on the map is given by $y = \operatorname{arctanh}(\sin(L))$, where $\operatorname{arctanh}$ is the inverse of the hyperbolic tangent function.