MatlabCEA

This Matlab package contains tools for configuring and running NASA's CEA program.

Installation

Using SSH or Linux (recommended)

Use an SSH client to log in to a Linux server if you are not on one, or just open a terminal. To clone this repository into your Matlab folder (assuming it is at ~/Personal/MATLAB), enter the following commands:

cd ~/Personal/MATLAB
git clone git://github.com/PurdueH2Lab/MatlabCEA.git

Note: if you are a developer (and want to be able to push changes to this repository), use the following notation instead:

git clone git@github.com/PurdueH2Lab/MatlabCEA.git

To update your version of the code if you have already cloned the repository:

cd ~/MATLAB/MatlabCEA
git pull

To have the MatlabCEA folder added to your Matlab path by default, add the following line to your startup.m file in your default Matlab path (create startup.m if it does not exist):

addpath(fullfile(fileparts(userpath),'MATLAB','MatlabCEA'));

Using the GitHub Windows Client

Download GitHub for Windows and install it. Click the Clone in Desktop button on the right to clone this repository onto your local machine. The repository will be saved in your GitHub folder by default.

To update your version of the code, use the 'Sync' button in the GitHub program.

To have the MatlabCEA folder added to your Matlab path by default, add the following line to your startup.m file in your default Matlab path (create startup.m if it does not exist):

addpath(fullfile(fileparts(userpath),'GitHub','MatlabCEA'));

Using the Source Download

Download the source zip file. Extract its contents to your default Matlab folder and rename the newly created MatlabCEA-master folder to MatlabCEA.

To update your version of the code, delete the existing MatlabCEA folder and repeat the above procedure.

To have the MatlabCEA folder added to your Matlab path by default, add the following line to your startup.m file in your default Matlab path (create startup.m if it does not exist):

addpath(fullfile(fileparts(userpath),'MATLAB','MatlabCEA'));

User Guide

The MatlabCEA package documentation can be viewed in Matlab by typing

doc CEA

which will give you a list of functions and classes that are publicly accessible in the CEA package.

There are example scripts in the tests folder showing how to use the currently implemented features in MatlabCEA.

Future Development

This section lists, in no particular order, areas for future development of this tool.

• The current version of MatlabCEA uses a Windows CEA executable that is more than a decade old. The newest version available from NASA, however uses an interactive prompt that makes it difficult to script. There may be a way to get around this, or the Fortran source file could be modified and re-compiled. This would also allow this to be used in Linux environments.

• Currently, only rocket problems are implemented. On an as-needed basis, some of the other possible problem types (e.g. detonation) could be implemented too.

• The output currently only reads the data in the Detn.plt file, although there is a lot more information present in Detn.out. The script could be modified to read Detn.out if a specific need arose, which would give species compositions among other things.