Wednesday, January 2, 2008

About Vapour Liquid Equilibrium project

I studied chemical engineering at the university. During that time, I had created a C program for performing Vapour Liquid Equilibrium (VLE) calculations (along with support to generate graphs). It was coded in Turbo C++ on DOS.

After graduating from the university, I got to know about open-source and felt that I should publish it on Sourceforge. Thus, my first open-source project came into existence. I converted the C code to Java, cleaned it up, and added documentation. The code is now well structured with support for easy extension.

VLE calculations involve two main things:
  • Calculating Activity coefficient
  • Calculating Fugacity coefficient
There are wide variety of methods available for calculating both of these. To keep the rest of the calculations generic, I first created Java interface files for Activity and Fugacity calculations (IActivityCalculator and IFugacityCalculator). For each method of calculation, we can implement these interfaces, and just update configuration files (activity.properties / fugacity.properties) to add the support for new method.

Currently, I have included support for:

Activity Calculators
  1. Margule's Equations
  2. Van Laar's Equations
Fugacity Calculators
  1. Virial Equations
  2. Redlich-Kwong Equation
  3. Peng-Robinson Equation
New methods like UNIFAC, UNIQUAC, Wilson-NRTL, etc. can be added easily. I have lost touch with Chemical Engineering, and so it seems that there won't be any further updates to this project from my side.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

heyy..i wwas searchin fr "VLE calculations" on d internet..found ur blog..m doin a project under a prof in BITS PIlani..i need ur help..can u mail me on jyoti.bits.88@gmail.com as soon as u read dis comment..thnaks a lot..that wud be a great help