ASCEND

License: GNU General Public License version 2.0 (GPLv2)

Web Page: http://ascend4.org/Student_projects

Mailing List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ascend-sim-users

ASCEND is a free open-source software program for solving small to very large mathematical models. ASCEND can solve systems of non-linear equations, linear and nonlinear optimisation problems, and dynamic systems expressed in the form of differential/algebraic equations.

There is an ASCEND Overview with more information about ASCEND capabilities. Alternatively, you can look at some screenshots or some example problems solved using ASCEND.

Please see http://ascend4.org/GSOC2015 for application template and guidelines if you are applying for GSOC with us.

Projects

• Chemical engineering domain-specific models Currently ASCEND has limited number of pre-defined models that are relevant to the field of Chemical Engineering. This narrows down the applicability of ASCEND and highlights the need for developing simple and important process models in ASCEND. Also, with the development of these process models, a new need for flash algorithms will also be created. . The thermodynamic supports in ASCEND also needs to be broadened.
• GUI improvements The main goal is to port Ascend application to Gtk3, add installer for Windows users and implement functionalities, which are not available in GUI now.
• Ideal Mixture Support for FPROPS Ideal solutions (ideal-gas and ideal-solution mixtures) are the starting point for thermodynamic modeling of multicomponent mixtures. This project will add ideal-gas and ideal-solution capabilities to the FPROPS library, and prepare for future implementation of non-ideal (real) mixtures. Existing FPROPS facilities for calculating pure-component properties will be used to find pure-component properties. These are then aggregated to calculate ideal-gas or ideal-solution mixture properties.
• Numerical Algorithmic Enhancement: Dynamic Modelling in ASCEND The IDA solver requires more refinements both in the numerical as well as user-facing aspects. One important issue is to do with EVENT syntax - which helps to model whole range of systems, in which parametric constants themselves change values with triggered events, or even more sophisticated systems in which constraint equations are added or deleted when a given event is triggered. This project attempts to strengthen the functionalities of the IDA solver.
• Tabulated Frontend to FPROPS We plan to give a efficient frontend to FPROPS by implementing a Tabulated Taylor Series Expansion. We expect this implementation to reduce the computation time as bulk of the time is moved to allocating and building the table. After that, successive calls to evaluate some thermodynamic state property can be efficiently calculated by looking up into the table and doing very few arithmetic operations to get the result.