Old_Bugs

June 30th 2004

The below two major bugs have been squashed in Kintecus V3.5

************************
** MAJOR BUG FIXES *****
************************

There have been a number of minor bugs fixed and most of those will go unnoticed, but if you are working with constant-volume (isochoric) adiabatic runs (in kinetics mode, not equilibrium mode) or are applying a "Constant File" to a species in thermodynamic mode then the following two major fixes will apply to you. Those of you that only use Kintecus in Equilibrium Mode can ignore these two major bug fixes as they only pertain to Kintecus in chemical kinetics mode.

<< MAJOR BUG CORRECTION 1 >>

* The constant-volume (isochoric) thermodynamics in some non-isothermal adiabatic runs have been corrected so some users might see the correct higher temperature. Again, this is model and initial condition dependent so some users might not see any change while other might see final temperatures change upto 40% and ignition delay changes of 10-30%. Example, the five GRI-MECH samples that come with Kintecus show almost NO CHANGE, BUT the three ethanol combustion runs show some changes in ignition delays. For those that are performing runs in CONSTANT-PRESSURE, then you can safely ignore this bug fix, constant-pressure mode works fine.

<< MAJOR BUG CORRECTION 2 >>

* Running Kintecus in chemical kinetics mode with thermodynamics and using a "Constant File" (an external concentration profile) on a species can cause the previous versions of Kintecus to immediately bomb out with an "Overflow" error. This made it appear it was an integration problem, but it never was an integrator problem. The values in your Constant File were accidentally set to either zero or to a colossal negative number. This has now been fixed and is working properly.

May 31st, 2004

VBA Excel Bug:

   If you store temperature/concentration/other perturbation profiles within
   an Excel Kintecus Spreadsheet or store thermodynamic databases or
   Chemname files (by prefixing worksheets with "O_"), then Excel will
   not write those files into the Kintecus Path. They will usually be written
   to "C:\", but clicking on the RUN button a SECOND time, forces Excel to
   write to your Kintecus Path (usually "C:\Program Files\Kintecus" ).

*** FIX ***

   You can wait until the next version of Kintecus to be released OR simply
   to remember after loading the Kintecus Spreadsheet, RUN the simulation
   at least ONCE whereby Kintecus will always write files to your Kintecus
   Path and not "C:\" *OR* modify
   the VBA code simply by moving the following code in the Kintecus Run
   Macro to right under the last DIM statement.
   (Dim V1 As Double, V2 As Double, V3 As Double, nation As Integer):

MOVE THESE PIECE OF CODE:

' goto kintecus directory
KPATH = Worksheets("CONTROL").Range("A8:A8")
If Right(KPATH, 1) <> "\" Then
KPATH = KPATH & "\"
End If
L = InStr(KPATH, ":")
PC = ""
If L > 1 Then PC = UCase$(Mid$(KPATH, L - 1, 1))
If L <= 1 Or PC = "" Or PC < "A" Or PC > "Z" Then PC = "C"
ChDrive PC & ":"
ChDir KPATH

right under the VBA code:

Dim V1 As Double, V2 As Double, V3 As Double, nation As Integer

December 7th, 2003

********* ** BUG ** ********* The bug is associated with the '-o' switch to output the system properties as the simulation runs. The system properties of Gas Density and Gas Molar Volume are incorrect if you are using UNITS of moles/cm^3 or molecules/cm^3. **************** ** TO CORRECT ** **************** To correct for UNITS of moles/cm^3, simply multiply the Gas Density and Gas Molar Volume by 1000*6.02E+23 . To correct for UNITS of molecules/cm^3, simply multiply the Gas Density and Gas Molar Volume by 6.02E+23/1000 . UNITS of moles/L should give the correct results, so no correction for that.

June 21st, 2003

** BUG DESCRIPTION **

There is a slight bug with the normalized sensitivity analysis
feature (the -SENSIT switch) of Kintecus. The bug causes Kintecus to
appear to take forever to calculate normalized sensitivity analysis
matrix files. This is noticeable if you add the "-show" switch on the
command line and you will see the time in the Time(s) column repeat
the same time forever. You will also get a CONC.TXT output file that
is extremely large and will continue to grow until it fills up the
harddisk.

** TEMPORARY FIX **

The current fix is to increase or decrease the number of normalized
sensitivity analysis matrix files you are creating using the -SENSIT
switch. For example, if you experience this error trying to output 10
normalized sensitivity analysis matrix files using -SENSIT:1:10
switch, then increase the 10 to 11 or decrease it to 9. This will
force Kintecus to select different timing meshes that do not cause it
to hang on the previous time. If you are using the other way to
compute normalized sensitivity analysis matrix files via
"-SENSIT:1:TIMES,n1,n2,n3,nn" switch, such as "-SENSIT:1:TIMES,1e-3,
2e-3, 2.5e-3, 3e-3, 4.9e-3" and suppose Kintecus is hanging on the
time of 2.5e-3 seconds, then change the 2.5e-3 time to 2.51e-3 seconds
or change it to 2.49e-3 seconds. Kintecus should be able then to
"latch on" and continue with the rest of the computation.

January 27, 2003 (corrected in V3.1):
When using the Excel graphical interface and you are fitting parameters against a dataset,
there is a bug in which Excel will overwrite the last column of data with the previous column.
For example, if your FITDATA worksheet has Time(s) in the first column, E in the second
column and S in the third column, when you click run, Excel will output the FITDATA
worksheet as Time(s), E and E, the third column containing data will be overwritten with E.
THIS ONLY HAPPENS IF YOU ARE USING THE EXCEL GRAPHICAL INTERFACE. If you directly
enter your experimental data into the file "fitdata.txt" there will be no problem. A temporary
fix is to duplicate the last column of data: i.e. in the FITDATA Excel worksheet, the
columns: Time(s),E and S should have four columns of data: Time(s), E,S and S AGAIN.
The next release of Kintecus will fix this.
Also, the Periodic text file containing two columns of data:
new mass/isotope element name, mass weights should be named Periodic.dat
and NOT period.dat as stated in the manual.

December 2nd, 2001:
Version 2.69 of Kintecus has been released. Small bugs associated with some error reporting routines were corrected, such as Kintecus incorrectly reporting the wrong species not being saved (displayed) to fit/regress the experimentally saved/obtained species data in the fitdata.txt file. Kintecus V2.69 corrects this.
Problem with using temperature programs with fitting/regressing data was corrected.
If you had only one data line in your fitdata.txt file, Kintecus would skip over this single line and report a sum of squares of zero. This too has been corrected.

NOVEMBER 10th, 2001:

The Chemkin to Kintecus translator program, CK2KIN.EXE, has a serious bug in it. Depending on the conditions, it will sometimes drop a zero from a number containing an exponent, i.e. 1.5E+30 will become 1.5E+03 or 7E+10 will become 7E+01. The Kintecus GRI-MECH-3.0 model and the ethanol combustion model (previous Chemkin models translated into Kintecus format by CK2KIN.EXE) contain a few wrong rates and TROE factors. Interestingly, re-running the ethanol.bat runs with the NEW CORRECT model shows almost no difference in the ignition delay results, BUT the GRI-MECH-3.0 model (a highly condensed kinetics mechanism) shows concentration profiles off from 10%-40%. Although, the FINAL concentration and temperature values for the GRI-MECH-3.0 runs are only off a few percent, primarily due to most of the reactions have equilibrium constraints. The Kintecus V2.6 program is fine.

So, what should you do? If you do NOT use the Kintecus GRI-MECH-3.0 or ethanol combustion models or you do NOT use the CK2KIN.EXE translator, you can safely ignore this message. Again, Kintecus V2.6 is fine; there are currently no known bugs in V2.6.

If you only use the ethanol combustion model, you can probably ignore this message, but it would be wise to download the new Kintecus Zip file (Kintecus_V26_2.ZIP). The new ZIP file contains the updated CK2KIN.EXE program and the correct ethanol combustion model and GRI-MECH models as well as two more additional GRI-MECH-3.0 test runs (grict2.bat and griv29.bat) to further test the CK2KIN.EXE program against published, refereed experimental results. In addition, the documentation has been slightly updated and a tiny .BAT file is missing to complete the Kintecus Excel GRAPHICAL interface.

If you use the GRI-MECH model or have used the Chemkin to Kintecus translator program CK2KIN.EXE, you should download the new Kintecus ZIP file (Kintecus_V26_2.zip).

NOVEMBER 1st, 2001: Kintecus V2.60 currently has none known.

OCTOBER: Kintecus V2.31 has a bug in which if you are doing Thermodynamics (via -THERM switch) and your model has new species not defined in the SPECIES.DAT file, Kintecus V2.31 will output the usual ADDSPEC.TXT file containing those new species, run, and then stop with a error. Download Kintecus V2.60 which fixes this bug, or you can append those new species defined in ADDSPEC.TXT to the end of the SPECIES.DAT file (but before the END statement) and re-run.