A slightly different concept
Craig Morris
open source software, however I think there is an element to it that
justifies the connection and the members of this group are exactly the
type of folks whose feed back I would appreciate.
In the hopes of generating some credibility, I will mention that I was
the creator of Hysim, did the original design on what would become
Hysys, was a co-author of Sim42 and am a minority shareholder in, but
not an employee of, Virtual Materials Group.
When I left Hyprotech many years ago, I did not expect to ever be
involved with chem eng software again, but I got drawn into the Sim42
development because it had always bothered me that there were few good
alternatives for individuals or companies that could not afford or
justify expensive process simulators. Unfortunately the Sim42 project
had to end for me when VMG decided, over my objections, but probably
for sound commercial reasons, to make a proprietary version of Sim42
the engine for its VMGSim simulator.
However my connection with VMG did give me access to their excellent
property package and about a year ago I decided to put together a
little program to just do simple flashes etc. Predictably the scope
expanded and became what I now call VMCalculator, which is sort of a
property package based interactive development environment for coding
models in Basic. It is robust enough that I have programmed a version
of the Sim42 column (minus pump arounds and side strippers due to
sloth) as a model in it.
I won’t go into an at length description here, but the open source
connection is that the program is linked to an online library where
models can be shared with others. Loading a model from the library is
about as easy as loading one from disk.
Because it contains VMG’s property package, it cannot be distributed
as open source or even for free, but VMG has agreed to allow a student/
hobbyist (no commercial use) subscription for just $5US per month.
These subscribers are only allowed to store their models in the public
online library, hence enforcing open source for the model code at
least. Commercial subscribers are allowed to use the program for
commercial purposes and store objects on their local hard drive for a
$99US per month subscription. In both cases subscriptions can be
started and stopped as desired subject to the one month minumum.
Unusually for this industry, it is available for Intel Macs, Windows
and at least some flavours of Linux.
Clearly this will be a very niche product, with no real returns for
VMG. It really just constitutes a hobby for myself, but I think it
might prove useful in a student environment and to a few folks who
have the skills to create interesting solutions, but not the resources
for a full fledged simulator.
If anyone has time to check out the concept at the web site http://vmcalc.redtree.com
and let me know their thoughts, I would be very grateful.
Craig Morris
http://craig.redtree.com
John Pye
> If anyone has time to check out the concept at the web site http://vmcalc.redtree.com
> and let me know their thoughts, I would be very grateful.
>
Good to hear you're still floating around in the engineering software
area. I had contact with you a few years when Sim42 was still open
source, it was a shame to see how it was withdrawn from FOSS development
in that way.
My response to this 5 USD/mon deal is that it looks problematic: all
problems solved by students will be publicly available by everyone else?
It won't be very good for homework tasks, then, will it, because of
plagiarism?
In any case, I was unable to access the site: it looks like some sort of
DNS problem, possibly.
Cheers
JP
--
Dr John Pye
Dept of Engineering
Australian National University
Craig Morris
> My response to this 5 USD/mon deal is that it looks problematic: all
> problems solved by students will be publicly available by everyone
> else?
Yes, that is true.
> It won't be very good for homework tasks, then, will it, because of
> plagiarism?
Hmmm, interesting problem. It would be easy to detect blatant
plagiarism, since there would only be one source for it, but stealing
and modifying the concepts would be easy.
> In any case, I was unable to access the site: it looks like some
> sort of
> DNS problem, possibly.
I know that other folks have been able to get to the site and I was
able to access it from some remote systems I can log into as well as
site checking sites. Perhaps you could try it again.
If all else fails you could try the Google based address, but please
let me know if you need to resort to this
http://redtreedev.appspot.com/
Craig