libICEpost

Postprocessing of data sampled from internal combustion engines (Experimental, 1D/0D (Gasdyn/GT-Power), 3D (LibICE-OpenFOAM/commercial codes), etc.)

Installation

Requirements

Conda

It is suggested to use Anaconda python environment manager to use the library, so that the correct python version can be used in a dedicated environment. Currently working on python version 3.11.4.

Important

When you install conda (eg. C:\Users\your_name\anaconda3), it is suggested to let it initialize conda automatically at the first installation (insert yes when it requires). Then, opening a new terminal you should see the (base) in front of your user-name in the command line:

(base) user@machine:/home/user$  

Then, you can disable the auto-activation by entering the following line in the new terminal:

conda config --set auto_activate_base false

Now, opening a new terminal you should not see the (base) anymore.

Open a new terminal in the folder and execute the following line to install Python 3.11, which is required.

conda install python==3.11

You may want to install it in a dedicated environment, to prevent conflicts between packages and python versions. Here is an example to create the dedicated environment ICE:

conda create --name ICE python==3.11

Then you can activate the environment with:

conda activate ICE

From now, you should see the (ICE) entry at the beginning of the command line, showing you are in the python environment ICE.

Visual Studio Code

Installation of Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is suggested. Follow the instructions to install the program. The following extension for Python has to be installed Python Extension Pack.

Note

In VS Code the Python interpreter has to be selected. To do so, use Ctrl+Maiusc+P, search for Python: Select Interpreter and then select the available Python interpreter.

GIT

GIT is necessary to download the repository. Follow the instructions to install the program. No further action are necessary.

Downloading and installing the source code of LibICE-post

Download

In order to download the source code of LibICE-post proceed as follows:

1. Create a new folder in your home directory (C:\Users\<username> on Windows OS, /home/<username> on Debian) called LibICE_repo, where the various libraries will be stored;
2. Now open VS Code and with the Open Folder command, under the File tab open the folder you just created;
3. You should find yourself in VS Code with the Explorer bar on the left that has the name of the folder you created as title.

Important

Only for Windows user
Open Setting (shortcut Ctrl+,), and input in the search bar:

select default profile

Dind and select the Command Prompt as Default Profile, you should see a similar result as reported here:

Terminal > Integrated > Default Profile: Windows
The default terminal profile on Windows.
Command Prompt

Now open a new terminal by clicking on New Terminal in the Terminal menu (Ctrl+shitf+ò keyboard shortcut on Windows OS). A window on the bottom of VS Code should have appeared. In the terminal, copy the following command to download LibICE-post:

git clone https://github.com/RamogninoF/LibICE-post.git

You should now see in the explorer bar that a new LIBICE-POST tab has appeared, like so

Installing LibICE-post

Now that LibICE-post is downloaded, it is to be installed. First, activate the conda environment where you want to install the libraries (in this example ICE).

conda activate ICE

Then you can install it:

pip install ./LibICE-post

Note

You may run pip install with -e option to install in editable mode, so that the changes are detected when pulling from the repository. If you do not include the entry -e, the repository must be installed again every time you pull changes, otherwise they are not detected. This is suggested for users.

It might happen that spyder or VS Code cannot access the module when installed in editable mode (ImportError: module libICEpost not found). If so, install it with editable_mode=strict (highly suggested):

pip install -e ./LibICE-post --config-settings editable_mode=strict

Follow the instruction on the terminal and you should see the following line as a result.

Successfully installed libICEpost

Usage

Now that libICEpost is installed, you can start to use it. To do so, under LibICE-post\tutorials\sparkIgnition you find a simple case intended to be used as base to understand the usage of this tool. Please duplicate the sparkIgnition folder in another location of your choice and the open that folder in VS Code. You should find yourself in this image.

Setting the dictionaries

In the dictionaries folder you find four different Python scripts that will be used to compose the dictionary used by the post-processing tool. In particular these are:

• combustionProperties.py, used to specify the initial mixture of the charge trapped inside the cylinder;
• dataDict.py, used to determine the pre-processing of the data that will be used in the tool;
• thermophysicalProperties.py used to choose the models to compute the various thermodynamic quantities;
• controlDict.py, acts as wrapper of the previous three files and allows the specification of engine-specific features and the crank angle period of interest to be processed.

The user is highly encouraged to read and understand each of these files as they greatly influence the results of the post-processing.

Additional documentation will be provided in later releases.

Including the data

The data folder contains the experimental/simulated data that will be imported by the tool to be processed. The minimum requirement is to have a in-cylinder pressure file (in this case the p.cyl file). It is not necessary that your data is formatted in the same way as the one in the tutorial case. You can specify the reading of a given format in the dataDict.py script. In the proposed case the reading of pressure is performed as follow in dataDict.py:

#Pressure (mandatory)
"p":\ #specify how the variables will be called in runtime
{
    #The format of the data to load
    "format":"file",    #Retrieve from file
    
    #The parameters to use
    "data":
    {
        #Name of the file
        "fileName":"p.Cyl",
        
        #Options to apply (scaling, shifting, etc.)
        "opts":\
            {
                #"delimiter":",",   #Delimiter in file, in this case there was no delimiter !
                # "varScale":1.0,   #Scaling variable
                # "varOff":0.0,     #Offset to variable
                # "CAscale":1.0,    #Scaling CA
                # "CAoff":0.0,      #Offset to CA
            }
    }
},

As specified before, the pressure is the only mandatory data needed as import. However, other quantities can and have to specified, such as the mass at IVC, the wall temperatures and others. The user can decide to specify any variable of interest by reading those from files, by considering them constant or by defining a specific function.

Running the main.py script

After having set-up the files in the dictionaries folder and having made sure to include in the data folder the required quantities, you can open the main.py file in which you'll find the main script to postprocess the data.

The main.py script is mainly divided of two parts: data processing and post-processing. The former is composed of the loading of the model from the various dictionaries stored in the dictionariesdirectory, plus the call to the processing of the data.

#Load the model
model = loadModel("./dictionaries/")

#Process the data in the engine model
model.process()

The following part of the code is intended to post-process the data that was processed by the tool. Here you can define some specific plots you want to see like a p-V diagram, which is already implemented as part of the model class:

#Plotting p-V diagram
ax = model.plotPV(label="CFD", timingsParams={"markersize":120, "linewidth":2})
plt.tight_layout()

It is possible to produce user-defined plots with the model.data.plot() function, like done here:

#Plotting ROHR vs CA diagram
model.data.plot(x = "CA", y="ROHR", label="CFD", legend=True, c="k", figsize=(10,10))
plt.xlabel("Crank angle [CA]")
plt.ylabel("Rate of heat release [J/deg]")
plt.tight_layout()

You can change the x and y axes as you wish, paying attention that they are defined in the model.data structure.

To launch the script use the Run Python File command on the upper-right corner.

A terminal should open and two plots should appear.

From this simple case setup you can explore and expand to run the postprocess you wish. A brief documentation (that will be expanded) is reported in each of the files under the dictionaries folder.

In the data folder, the data that has to be processed has to be included.

Additional documentation can be found in references

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, for Windows user, when reopening VS Code the following orange warning may appear in the terminal tab

If this happens, please click on Relaunch Terminal with hovering (not clicking) on cmd. The next time you reopen the folder it should not happen again.

Installation

• Ubuntu 18.04: Installation may fail when compiling CANTERA due to missing BLAS library. If so, install an older version of CANTERA:

pip install cantera==3.0.0

Installing from PyPI (skip for ICEGroup)

Installation from PyPI repositories (not up-to-date):

pip install libICEpost

Contributing

• Federico Ramognino - Code development (all of it)
• Alberto Ballerini - Testing and documentation

License

libICEpost was created by Federico Ramognino. It is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.

Credits

libICEpost was created with cookiecutter and the py-pkgs-cookiecutter template.