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If you want to learn chemical engineering using an interactive environment, Octave is an open source software program you’d be interested in. It’s very user friendly and a student using it for the first time will shortly be comfortable with it. Octave uses a language similar to Matlab in order to facilitate experiments and computations. Those familiar with Fortran, C++, C and other similar languages will be comfortable customizing Octave.

This course package was designed for use in the classroom for chemical reactor design problems but not limited to it. It is also used in research, commercial applications and in teaching, allowing students to learn to solve realistic problems. Octave, being open source, adds functions to keep abreast of Matlab so that users will always have the latest downloads.

Octave can be run on almost any platform and its interpreter has DASSL and LSODE incorporated into it. You can use Octave for integer-valued matrices and scalars or solve nonlinear algebraic equations. It can integrate functions over infinite as well as finite equations. Octave’s interpreter can create 2 and 3 dimensional charts, graphs and plots that can be printed or saved for future use.

Octave shares many of Matlab’s features, as it was built to be a complement to it. They both have powerful math functions, built in support for complex numbers and very large function libraries. This open source application is user friendly and very good for teaching programming to those who haven’t had any courses in computer science engineering. Anyone wishing to use it can download Octave for free. It is an open source software so there is no charge attached for using Octave. The latest stable version of Octave is 3.0.3 which was released in October 10 2008.

If you have a question that’s not in the nearly 600 page manual, you can get support through the mailing list provided.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 4:43 am and is filed under General, Open Source, Software.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.