technical information

SteamTab Duo™ Technical Information

Introduction

SteamTab Duo, designed as an add-in package to popular spreadsheet applications, allows users the convenient access, without leaving the spreadsheet computation environment, to a variety of steam property values. SteamTab Duo contains a comprehensive set of thermodynamic and transport properties applicable over a wide range of conditions, with selected derivative and dimensionless properties.

Design

SteamTab Duo uses fundamental equations to calculate all steam properties with no interpolation or curve fits to raw steam data. With SteamTab Duo, users have a choice of basing their steam property calculations from either the scientific formulation, or the industrial formulation. The formulations used in SteamTab Duo and their references are shown in the following table.

Note: SteamTab does not include properties for ice.

Implementation

The core routines in SteamTab are written in C++ and compiled using Microsoft's Visual C++ into a standalone dynamic link library (DLL). All of the routines use double precision arithmetic (8 byte real). In addition to using standard compiler optimization techniques to speed-up calculations, SteamTab employs an innovative and proprietary "caching" strategy to minimize repetitive calculations. Our internal benchmarks indicate that these optimizations give a performance boost of 2 to 5 times over the un-optimized and "un-cached" versions.