DWSIM Development Blog

After some experiments with colors, fonts, lines and an enhanced connector path drawing algorithm, here is the new appearance of the Flowsheet (and a pic of the "old" one for comparison):

The "old" PFD

New PFD

Do you like the new colors or would you prefer another color scheme, or even a list of color schemes to select?

Hello dear users, here are some updates on what's happening around DWSIM:

Forums

The Forums are now open for anonymous access. Please use them if you have any questions, problems, suggestions, etc...

Feature Requests

Also, if you have anything that you'd like to see in DWSIM, use the Feature Request Tracker. It is also open to anonymous users, at least until we start to receive spams.

Additional Languages

Version 1.6 would include additional google-translated languages like Traditional Chinese, Thai, French, Russian... but as I started to prepare for the release, I figured out how difficult would be to manage all these "new" languages, specially when I started, eventually, to add new forms and modify the existent ones... and there is also the problem of the automated translation quality, which is not very good (actually it isn't good at all, specially for scientific texts...).

Anyway, I can work that out if there is enough demand for another language. I know that there is a lot of chinese users and if any of you would like to translate DWSIM to chinese, I have the original pt-BR, en-US and automated zh-CHS (simpl. chinese) and zh-CHT (trad. chinese) RESX files as well. Just remember that there are 77 files to translate - and that's a lot of text. Thankfully there are some RESX editing tools which can help a lot with the translation process - Sisulizer is a very good one - not free, but there is a 30-day fully-funcional version which can be downloaded from the website. I actually used it for the automated translation, just for testing purposes. With Sisulizer you can use Google or Bing translators to translate all files at once and then review/edit the translated strings in one single table, with the original strings side-to-side.

New Additions / Roadmap

For the next 1.6 builds I'll focus on validation, tutorials, guides and wizards for the most used DWSIM features, never forgetting about fixing the bugs found on the way, obviously. For the 1.7 version and up (until DWSIM 2) I have some thoughts on what to include:

- User Properties: something similar to HYSYS, allowing users to write expressions and even macros to define new properties for unit operations and streams, based on the existent ones. The basis is already there - the new property system makes this kind of feature much easier to implement than it was before.

- Custom Unit Operations: similar to the previous one, giving the user the ability to write a macro which will run when the unit operation calculation is requested. The problems that I'm facing about implementing this right now are the need of a good, free text editor with synthax highlighting and intellisense. Also, it's not very clear to me how to compile and run code on the fly in .NET, mixing the execution of this code with the one which is already running. i.e. how to get input stream properties from the running simulation, use them in the "user code" and write the results from the calculations to the output streams.

- COSMO-SAC activity coefficient model: some people already asked me to implement this model in DWSIM, but I'm thinking about the benefits of it when compared to the existing UNIFAC tools and what would be the advantage of having it available - in other words, what DWSIM would be able to do that it cannot do now. I would appreciate if someone could help me on this.

- Equilibrium and Gibbs Reactors: the current implementation of the equilibrium reactor is not very good. I'll rewrite it from scratch and finish the implementation of the Gibbs reactor using some methods described in Michelsen's book.

For DWSIM 2, I've defined some 'must-have' features:

- Full bidirectional CAPE-OPEN compliancy for Unit Operations and Property Packages 

- Multiphase Flash support

- Fully documented COM/.NET Object model (DWSIM Programming API)

- Excel add-in for thermo models

I'm also thinking about switching to .NET 3.5/4 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) instead of .NET 2/GDI+. It's just an idea which seems interesting to me, but I still don't know what we would gain with such a big change and what are the benefits of WPF over GDI... coding in VB 9/10 is more 'productive' than VB 8, though.

Maybe it's time to draw a roadmap diagram...