Intermediate thermodynamics

Using CoolProp

November 13, 2020

Prof. Patrick Lynch, MIE, UIC

Note: CoolProp is not necessary to solve the project, but for those who are savvy with computers, this software tool can help greatly.

CoolProp is a tool that can help you identify the properties of a thermodynamic state of a real fluid. It is like an automated version of looking up things from the steam tables for many different real fluids.

The main use case is to call a function like this:

PropsSI("T","P",101325,"Q",0,"Water")

to identify the temperature (in K) when given the other properties defining a state (here pressure = 101325 Pa and quality 0.). The real fluid in this case is water, but others are available here.

This results in 373.12…, which is the saturated temperature (in K) of water at 1atm.

CoolProp is powerful because it can also produce other properties like enthalpy, density, entropy. Details on that, including variable names, are available here.

Installing and using CoolProp is very easy, both for a Windows environment, i.e. using excel, and for more advanced users, using python, Matlab, etc. More details are available here.

One should be able to get CoolProp to work for Excel in less than 5 minutes without any special knowledge.

The Windows installer with binaries are available here.

It is recommended to install the tool using the defaults (including Excel plugin, but not including EES, which you may not have on your machine). It should work automatically, but potentially one might have trouble, see here.

You can open an excel spreadsheet, and the PropsSI function becomes available for adding into cells.

For more advanced users, using python, a package is available in anaconda on conda-forge channel here.

conda install conda-forge::coolprop