Keeping Pace with Hardware and Software Changes: A Challenge to Plume Modeling

Visual Plumes, as a platform for plume models, embraces a history of distinct plume modeling approaches. Currently it supports analytical-empirical dimensional models (NRFIELD), Eulerian integral flux models (DKHw), and Lagrangian models (UM3). The advantages of empirical models applied to problems that closely satisfy the similarity parameters of experimental work should be obvious. Similarly, it is gratifying to know that a Lagrangian model such as UM3 can be shown to be equivalent, given the same entrainment and other assumptions and parameters, to Eulerian integral-flux models such DKHw. Remarkably, these achievements have been gained against a backdrop of changing hardware, software, and operating systems. Before Visual Plumes there was DOS Plumes. The Disk Operating System (DOS) was replaced by Windows, not to even broaden the argument to another OS, such as Apple and Linux.

In updating the plume modeling platform concept, Visual Plumes safeguarded the roles of the Lagrangian, Eulerian integral-flux, and empirical plume models by direct integration into the Visual Plumes code (UM3) or by supporting external execution and input and output processing (UDKw and RSB). More recently, the successor to RSB, NRFIELD, was directly reintegrated into the Visual Plumes code. Users derive benefits from these developments in terms of selecting the most appropriate model and easily comparing the results of different approaches. However, the process is incomplete in that ancillary programs, such as the internal diffuser hydraulics program PlumeHyd are not similarly updated. Even Visual Plumes is currently updated in an artificial development environment: the XP machine. Porting Visual Plumes software code to a Windows 10 compatible compiler (like a Delphi successor language) has proven difficult. To the authors’ knowledge a comprehensive translating application that would automatically convert existing code to the more modern language appears to not exist. This work seeks to begin to overcome this difficulty by using the comparatively simpler program PlumeHyd as test bed. It is hoped that its translation to the Embarcadero Berlin or Tokyo languages will pave the way for the ultimate update of Visual Plumes code. The effort is the topic of this work.