| RSI's IDL Speeds Reaction Design's Development Path
Efficient Yet Environmentally Friendly Chemical Engineering
Engineers in the chemical processing industry face the dual challenge of making processing more efficient while also allowing for environmentally responsible manufacturing practices. At Reaction Design, engineers are committed to developing software tools that bridge the gap between laboratory-induced chemical synthesis and real-life chemical reactions in the plant or factory setting. With the help of RSI's IDL, Reaction Design has created an easy-to-use commercial software simulation product to help engineers study chemical processes and their impact on the environment.
Reaction Design, a company whose business focuses on improving chemical processes using simulation techniques, data visualization, and engineering services, provides software simulation tools that incorporate both chemical reaction and transport models. The company needed to quickly develop a simple, multi-platform user interface that would be broadly accepted across a wide-range of user expertise, save engineers time, and help to differentiate Reaction Design in the marketplace.
Chemical Reaction Data: CHEMKIN
The software produced by Reaction Design simulates chemical process behavior using sets of chemical reaction rates and physical properties of chemical species. The simulations typically output data files that are 20-100 MB in size.
The engineers needed a commercial software tool that would allow them to quickly create a custom application for graphical post-processing of these large data files. They selected IDL to create the graphical user interface (GUI) and to provide quick visualization for CHEMKIN, a set of software tools for modeling chemical reactors.
"We selected IDL because it provides the fastest development path, is the most easily packaged as a plug-in to our product, and has great cross-platform UNIX and PC support," said Ellen Meeks, Reaction Design's vice president of research and development. "IDL also provides flexible high-level graphics capability for scientific visualization," Meeks said.
CHEMKIN includes software applications for the simulation, optimization and design of combustion, chemical processing, microelectronics processing and environmental protection. Designed for scientists involved in either the chemistry or engineering aspects of process designs including gas phase and surface chemistry, CHEMKIN has over 500 users worldwide.
A typical user of CHEMKIN might be a chemical or combustion engineer looking to improve specific aspects of chemical reactions critical to the overall quality, speed, or quantity of production - or elimination - of compounds.
Using IDL For GUI-Based Data Processing
According to Steve Miller, a software strategist for Reaction Design, the Research and Development group has generated 15,000 lines of IDL procedure code to build the GUI and Plotting Package for CHEMKIN. The group distributes a runtime version of the IDL procedures using the embedded license key and the IDL runtime engine. The IDL routines Miller's group uses most are the GUI routines and the line and contour plot objects - including IDLgrPlot and IDLgrContour.
"I like several things about IDL. It has a full-featured debugger, a well-behaved cross-platform ability and a very reliable runtime environment. We spend virtually no time finding or working around IDL bugs," said Miller. He added, "The stability of IDL and the consistency of its behavior across platforms is a key factor in our success."
IDL Helps Save Time, Attract Business and Increase Sales
From a timesaving perspective, both Miller and Meeks agreed that compared to writing code using another programming language, IDL saves time.
"We were able to develop an initial user-interface and post-processing capability in just a few person-months for our initial IDL-enhanced product release," stated Meeks. "This is significantly less than what would have been required for development in a lower-level programming language such as C++ or Java, especially if you consider the additional testing required for multiple-platform support and installation procedures," she said.
Reaction Design sees several marketing advantages associated with using IDL. According to Miller, IDL has affected the way Reaction Design conducts - and attracts - business.
"Providing professional quality post-processing options gave our users an easier path to the initial visualization of their results and provided us with a consistent interface to support - much easier than trying to support each user's choice of plotting package," Miller stated.
By using IDL to develop CHEMKIN's initial user interface for problem set-up and quick visualization of results, Reaction Design focused the bulk of its development resources on expanding the scientific capabilities of the software rather than on user-interface development. This approach provides more value to the end-customer and has allowed Reaction Design to expand into new markets with more focused and industry-specific capabilities.
Miller commented that CHEMKIN sales have steadily increased. "CHEMKIN sales have grown by more than 40 percent per year in every year since the IDL-based GUI was introduced," he said.
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