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[Craig Morris]

I have created what I think is a different and interesting tool for chemical engineering problems and think it might be of interest to some folks here.

As a minor shareholder and friend of the folks at Virtual Materials Group, the people behind VMGSim and VMGThermo, I have access to their excellent property package and this project started out as a simple wrapper around that package so I could do some flashes and obtain fluid properties on my Mac. However these things have a way of growing and the inclusion of compiled Basic scripting has resulted in something more interesting for both Mac and Windows (and some Linux distributions).

The details are on the web (vmcalc.redtree.com), so I won’t go into them here, but the built in language and programming interface is robust enough that I was able to write a rigorous column model with them. I uploaded this and some other models and examples to an online library that is accessible from within the program. This library is intended to be a place to share solutions and hopefully could become a repository of interesting models.

Because it contains VMG’s property package, it cannot be distributed in open source or even for free, but VMG has agreed to allow a student/hobbyist (no commercial use) subscription for just $5US per month. These subscribers are only allowed to store their models in the public online library.

Commercial subscribers are allowed to use the program for commercial purposes and store objects on their local hard drive for a $99US per month subscription. In both cases subscriptions can be started and stopped as desired, subject to the one month minimum.

I don’t expect to attract a large user base for what is clearly a niche application, but if any of you find it interesting, I would love to hear your comments.