Computer-aided Analytics and Process Analaysis
Matlab®
Matlab (Matrix Laboratory) is “a high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming” und is being developed and distributed by the company MathWorks. Due to the campus license, it is available for all employees and students at RWTH Aachen University for academic use.
The advantages lie in the handling of large amount of data, especially if it is available in the form of matrices or vectors. Because of the high performance, the flexible and manifold application and the good availability, Matlab is used in almost all research fields at the Institute of Heat and Mass Transfer to evaluate experimental and numerical data and for modeling purposes.
Ebsilon®Professional
The software environment EBSILON®Professional from STEAG Energy Services GmbH is a practical simulation tool for thermodynamic processes and is used to layout, design, analyze and optimize these processes. With its graphical user interface the thermal cycles can easily be composed from a comprehensive component database and finally calculated. The strengths of the software are its well-arranged user-interface and the feasibility to adapt components to individual applications. Furthermore, the extensive fluid database REFPROP provides properties of a large number of potential working fluids.
EBSILON has been used at the Institute of Heat and Mass Transfer for several years to simulate, analyze and evaluate thermal cycles for teaching, research and external orders. Especially, our work focusses on solar thermal and geothermal concepts, processes with heat storage, the analyses of Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) as well as single projects.