TPWS

TPWS

Thermodynamic Properties of Water and Steam

by Howard Chao and Stella Unruh

Suggested Improvements and Additions
The IAPWS has also released many other useful equations for calculating other properties of water. Some which may be of interest include the transport properties of water (viscosity, thermal conductivity etc). The procedure for calculating these values follow very closely the methods used throughout the IAPWS IF-97. Furthermore, there are numerous backward equations to calculate the properties of water and steam as functions of other variables. Implementing these equations would allow for calculations of properties under different conditions and would not force the user into knowing both the temperature and pressure of the system.

Although a broad unit set is incorporated into the built in unit converter, there are still many unit combinations which have not been accounted for. Addition of more units would probably make this program more complete and universal. Furthermore, implementing the unit converter into all of the sub-functions would be a nice feature (currently, the unit converter is only present through tpws.m). However such a change would require a slight modification to the overall structure of the system.

It may also be beneficial to program a function which may interpolate the saturated steam table data for specific values if the quality of steam is known. Although this calculation may be done easily by hand, computerized calculations favor greater accuracy and speed.

Perhaps the most significant upgrade to this application suite would be to incorporate a GUI to accommodate the program. Such changes would make the application easier to use and more user friendly. However, development of such a feature would require an advanced knowledge of Matlab programming and a considerable time investment.