A Web Service Infrastructure and its Application for Distributed Chemical Equilibrium Computation

Volume 3, Issue 1 (June 2012), pp. 19–27

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@article{jocse-3-1-3,
  author={Subrata Bhattacharjee and Christopher P. Paolini and Mark Patterson},
  title={A Web Service Infrastructure and its Application for Distributed Chemical Equilibrium Computation},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2012,
  month=jun,
  volume=3,
  issue=1,
  pages={19--27},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/3/1/3}
}

W3C standardized Web Services are becoming an increasingly popular middleware technology used to facilitate the open exchange of data and perform distributed computation. In this paper we propose a modern alternative to commonly used software applications such as STANJAN and NASA CEA for performing chemical equilibrium analysis in a platform-independent manner in combustion, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics research. Our approach is based on the next generation style of computational software development that relies on loosely-coupled network accessible software components called Web Services. While several projects in existence use Web Services to wrap existing commercial and open-source tools to mine thermodynamic data, no Web Service infrastructure has yet been developed to provide the thermal science community with a collection of publicly accessible remote functions for performing complex computations involving reacting flows. This work represents the first effort to provide such an infrastructure where we have developed a remotely accessible software service that allows developers of thermodynamics and combustion software to perform complex, multiphase chemical equilibrium computation with relative ease. Coupled with the data service that we have already built, we show how the use of this service can be integrated into any numerical application and invoked within commonly used commercial applications such as Microsoft Excel and MATLAB® for use in computational work. A rich internet application (RIA) is presented in this work to demonstrate some of the features of these newly created Web Services.