Nanos wrote:


It's hard to argue with the suggestion to use C++, so I won't. One advantage of Matlab is that it encourages one to think in terms of matrices (at least some of the parts I've used do), and you can still do some nice interfaces in it. You will probably eventually need to go to Fortran for a realistic simulation in order to get the level of performance you'll need.

I think at the moment due to a shortage of progammers, it gets written in whatever anyone knows well

Java!

...or whatever else that doesn't restrict the software to MS Windows.

a bit latter than i would have liked but here is a bit more of an outline of My energy accounting simulation

Ill post a background database structure latter (not at right computer at moment)

Firstly and reference to "costs" is energy and materials, not money and "work" refers to things done by people with specific skills


The first element of the simulation is "buildings"

Buildings all have a set of operating, maintenance and "Work" "costs" and can run one or more processes
each building has a set of location coordinates (for use in calculating transport costs), a certain amount of storage space
and some buildings have a quantity of housing.


Processes are defined transformation of materials from one type to another
each takes a set amount of Resource materials and energy and transforms it into
an amount of Product,waste product and bi-product materials.
exact amounts are modified from base values by the buildings efficiency rating

Each process also requires an amount of "work"

The final component is materials
each material has an energy value relating the cost of it being made and getting to its current location.




Any production building functions as follows

Materials are requested (at this point where they come from is not important) adn are delivered to the buildings stores

Here the transportation cost is added to the current energy value of the material.

The process running at the building removes materials from the stores and transforms them into the product + waste and bi products)

The energy value of product is then determined from the sum of the resource materials energy values, energy used in the process and an additional amount based on the maintenance cost of the building over its life time and "work" done.

the produced materials are then put into the buildings stores.

multiple layers of this will model most if not all possible manufacturing and production in terms of energy up to final consumption.

ill post more on this soon(tm)

I have updated the energy sim analysis. You can find it in the gallery section. It’s now much simpler as classes such as wind turbine and solar cells are really instances of energy generator. The energy generator is the source and energy user (such as a factory or transport vehicle) is the sink.

Comments? Do you thin we also need an energy store? What about doing this in Java? Can we have java applets on the site?


.ui

Um, I have zero experience in producing something though Java, so someone else, please?

I think that the representation is nice and that maybe we could have Energy Accounting as the topic for discussion next month. I'm sure that Mark Ciotola could also have something to say related to his article.

I can program in java and could make it an applet but i don’t know how an applet could be added to the site.

.ui

I haven't found out how to apply java to the website, but I've come up with the idea to use php (which is fully supported on the website) as an initial programming language for the simulation. It can handle simple mathematical equations easily and we can use IF clauses to adapt production to demand, waste, time and other factors.

The positive side of this is a relative ease with creating such an simulation and running it, but I'm not sure about its versatileness for more complex matters of calculation.