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