Canvas Development

This article is about planned development or proposed functionality. Comments welcome.

This page aims to document all the GSoC 2010 development carried out by Grivan. The goals and tasks are additionally listed over here for a quick look. Efforts will be to make the modeller powerful enough for some real and serious modelling. Use Cases are being developed as to see what do we expect from our modeller to be able to do for us, to identify the most important aspects and implement them.

Use Cases

We want to be able to solve following descriptions from our Canvas Based Modeller. These would help us identify as to what things require our immediate attention. This will help identify the missing elements from our design, and how best these should be implemented.

TODO : Add more ideas, put a concrete solution overview to each Case.

Regenerative Rankine Cycle

Rankine cycle is a thermodynamic process that converts heat energy into work. John Pye has already written an ASCEND language based model for this process here models/johnpye/rankine.a4c. We would want to develop a steady state model of regenrative Rankine cycle. This paricular model would require from us to:

• Elimination of redundant equations in closed loop flows.
• Specifications of flow streams.
  • It should be possible to switch between water to CO2 to toluene for example.
  • This should involve though redrawing the whole model again.
• Present graohical models used to create the flowsheet in a more intuitive form. In styles of a PID or a PFD.

Ammonia Synthesis Reactor

Ammonia is basically manufactured by chemical combination of nitrogen and hydrogen gases at high temperature and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The reactor could be desirable complexity which has to be decided. In any case Ammonia synthesis requires complex flow streams.

• The simulation type needs to determined. What kind of reactor will be used for example plug flow or Gibbs.
• In this case connections may need to be manually specified in order to provide complex flows as required.

Non-Chemical Models

ASCEND is a powerful language, it is fairly general to support all kinds of mathematical models. For example take look at these:

• Damped response
• Calculation of sun position
• Four bar linkage

Specification of flow streams should not make the modeller lose it generality. Other chemical process modellers make the modeller specific for use with chemical engineering models. However we would also want to have our modeller models of mechanical and electrical architecture. Basically maintain the ASCEND's general approach.

• Flow streams have to be mentioned such that it does not affect the type of system being modelled does not require specification of flow streams or it is obvious.
  • For example, current and torque/energy/tension are obviously the streams in an electrical model and a particular mechanical model.

Dynamic Modelling of Servo Motor with backlash and PID control

• TODO : Add description

Update for Gaphas HEAD

The following section lists all the updating that needs to be done or has been done to work with latest gaphas head.

Aspects

One of the features that enhances the usability of the canvas is the dragging of ports to ports support to specify a stream. In reality these provides ARE_THE_SAME arguments when the ASCEND code is created.

• The Aspects of gaphas API define the 'how' and Tools the 'what'.
• Specific handlers now have to be created to handle events like line disconnection on either of the ports, re-connection etc.
• This should be carefully designed to have no problems in the future as it is already an important component.

TODO: Add other features to be upgraded

GUI Usability Improvements

TODO : Add details

Support for user-customisable custom icon types

TODO : Add details

Specification of flow streams

To provide reusable modelling architecture for modelling systems with non-trivial flow streams, the flow streams should be manually specified. This provides and excellent way to have the same model provide simulation for any number of streams. Two implementations have to be taken care of to specify streams;

• GUI implementation:

  This would provide a suitable GUI to select the stream.

• Application level implementation

  This would add actual stream modifications to the block code.

Currently in process of studying how streams are handled by the ASCEND language itself.

TODO : Add implementation details

Type Checking

While connecting two blocks together the type of input and output port of the connector must be matched.

TODO : Add implementation details

Key Deliverables

To set a stone for the GSoC project following have to be implemented

• Canvas Model for a Regenerative Rankine cycle
• Ammonia synthesis reactor
• Support for user customisable icon-types for blocks

Weekly Reports

The weekly reports will be filed here. Week 0 starts from 24th of May up-to 30th of May and so on.

Week 0

24th-May-10 to 30th-May-10

• TODO

Week 1

31st-May-10 to 6th-June-10

• TODO

Week 2

7th-June-10 to 13th-June-10

• TODO

Week 3

14th-June-10 to 20th-June-10

• TODO

Week 4

21st-June-10 to 27th-June-10

• TODO

Week 5

28th-June-10 to 4th-July-10

• TODO

Week 6

5th-July-10 to 11th-July-10

• TODO

Week 7

12th-July-10 to 18th-July-10

• Submit Mid Term Evaluations

Week 8

19th-July-10 to 25th-July-10

• TODO

Week 9

26th-July-10 to 1st-August-10

• TODO

Week 10

2nd-August-10 to 8th-August-10

• TODO

Week 11

9th-August-10 to 16th-August-10

• Finalise work
• Submit End Term Evaluations
• Tie loose ends