FLPROPS – THE FLUID PROPERTIES CALCULATOR Tom Ames and Mark Cutler

Motivation April 1st 2009  Heat Transfer problems often require extensive tabulated data  Iterative problems, especially, can be tedious

Current Solutions April 1st 2009  Fluid properties are looked up and linearly interpolated by hand  Very time consuming and prone to error  Jon Isaacson’s Thermophysical Properties Calculator is used  GUI keeps the calculator from being incorporated into other software packages  Numbers must still be written out by hand.

FLPROPS April 1st 2009  A MATLAB m-file that contains properties for the following fluids:  Air, Ammonia, Carbon Dioxide, Carbon Monoxide, Helium, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Water Vapor, Engine Oil, Ethylene Glycol, Glycerin, R-132a, R-22, Mercury, and Water  Delivers any property needed  Water quality also included

FLPROPS April 1st 2009  Called as a function from an m-file  You never even see the property value  Allows for iterative solutions in seconds  Syntax  [beta,Pr,nu,k]=flprops('air',Tf,'beta','Pr','nu','k');  Place the file in your working directory and type “help flprops” into the command window

Future Work  Porting flprops scripts to other math programs  Maple  Mathematica  Excel VBA  Making a stand alone program  Use GUI like Isaacson’s  Allow for command line prompt that can be called from other programs April 1st 2009

Questions? April 1st 2009