The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.
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With the aid of ECN's Dwight McKay, PostScript language printers such as the Apple Computer LaserWriter Plus are now able to print documents formated through Documentor's Work Bench (DWB). The $3800 LaserWriter Plus offers a compact, 300 dot/inch resolution, 8 page/minute, high quality printing device accessible through the "lpr" command. Chemical Engineering's Carolyn Blue, whose text processing experience spans the Civil Site's Printronix, Versatec (now retired), and Imagen LBP-10 Laser printing devices, has been using a LaserWriter Plus for two months. She reports no file changes are required to print a document on the Imagen or LaserWriter Plus under DWB. The printer type is selected on the DWB command line, so preparing a document for a LaserWriter Plus (which previously was printed on the Imagen, for instance) just requires the PostScript printer type "psc" in the "-T" option, and output direction to the lpr designation for the LaserWriter Plus. Maintenance for Apple LaserWriters is available from PUCC.
Computer simulation is an economic route for exploration of chemical reaction engineering dynamics in both industrial and instructional environments. Fran Sorge, a third year Chemical Engineering graduate student, has developed a Computer Aided Instruction program based on the Broadhead styrene/butadiene emulsion copolymerization simulator. Senior ChE students use the CAI program to determine thermodynamic and reaction rate parameters to predict the behavior of commercial scale systems. Since even a computer simulation or bench scale experiment has a real cost, each student's activities are logged through a UNIFY Relational Data Base System interface for student and instructor monitoring of progress and costs. Running under the "layers" package on a Teletype 5620 "BLIT" dot mapped display terminal, two "windows" present the simulator-database menu and a Tektronix 4014 graphic display emulator driven by Precision Visuals GRAFMAKER. Experiments and simulations access the student's private database, and use the IMSL "dgear" subroutine to solve the simulators 21 differential equations. Results are logged in the database and displayed in the GRAFMAKER window. The C language interface to UNIFY is used to communicate between the database, simulator, and student. The instructor manages the CAI package through a privileged mode of the UNIFY menu, and may grade student performance based on the individual cost records detailing student activity maintained within the database.
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