Contents - Index


Additional Capabilities for the Professional License

 

Annual, Commercial and Professional EES licenses are available.  All EES license types provide features such as curve-fitting, linear regression, property plots, contour plots, uncertainty analyses, solutions to complex and differential equations and others.  The Professional license provides the following additional capabilities.  Features available only in the Professional license will be displayed in brown text throughout this help file.

 

1. The Professional license allows a maximum of 12,000 variables and equations and the number of rows in the Parametric table is limited only by available memory. (The 64-bit Professional license provides 24,000 variables.)

 

2. A Diagram window is provided with the Annual and Commercial licenses in which a picture can be imported and text, input variables, and calculated variables may be superimposed in this window. The capabilities of the Diagram Window are greatly expanded in the Professional license.  For example, it is possible to define 'hot areas' in the Diagram Window which, when clicked, bring up Child Diagram windows.  The Child Diagram Window has all of the capabilities of a Diagram Window including the ability to launch other Child Diagram Windows. Link buttons may be placed on any of the Diagram windows to start external programs, run a macro, start another EES file or other tasks.

 

3. The Professional license provides much more capability for manipulating objects in the Diagram window.  Each object can be given a name and with this name, the color, size, rotation angle, its visibility and position of the object can be controlled with equations in the Equations Window.  These capabilities provide the animation capabilities in EES and allow the Diagram and Plot windows to display the current set of calculated data.

 

4.   Tabs can be added to the Equations window with the Professional license. The tabbed windows can be used to allow equations to be entered for multiple problems that are all saved in one EES file. Simply clicking on a tab effectively opens a new EES program. Alternatively, tabbed windows can be used to hold sections of a larger program that is defined in the Main (i.e., first) tab. The program sections, which can include Functions Procedures, and Subprograms, can be inserted in the main program using the $InsertTab directive. This capability reduces the number of equations that are visible for a large EES program.

 

5. A series of EES instructions (i.e., a macro) can be recorded in a set of Macro instructions.  The Macro instructions can provide do anything that you can do with the EES commands as well as doing other tasks that can only be done with macros.  The macros can be placed in separate .emf files or stored within EES.  They can appear in the Equations window with $RunMacroAfter and $RunMacroBefore directives. A macro can be brought into the Macro Window with the Open or Create Macro command in the File menu. EES can be started from a different program to replay all of the instructions in the Macro file. Used in this manner, EES can be directed to solve a set of equations in a specified text or EES file, plot the results and copy the plot and solution into specified text or Word file without ever appearing on the screen.  

 

6. Variable information can be read from or saved to a file.  A variable information file has a .VAR filename extension, but it is a text file that can be opened in a word processor or spreadsheet.  Variable information data can be saved to an existing .VAR file.  In this case, the file is updated with the current information for the variables that are in use.  Information in the file concerning variables that are not currently in use is not modified or deleted.  If a program contains one or more modules, a dropdown list appears at the top center of the Variable Info dialog from which the module or main program can be selected.  Variable information are read or saved for the selected module or main program.  Variable information files make it very easy to prepare and use a file containing your common variables with appropriate guess values, limits, and units.   

 

7. A Make Distributable command is provided to create a special purpose license of EES that will run up to 100 preselected problems. EES, the problems, and supporting files are placed in a single executable file that can be freely distributed to others. They do not need to own EES to run the calculations or create/change/view the plots and tables. The equations can be hidden from the user, if desired. 

 

8. The Professional license provides high accuracy properties for many refrigerant mixtures, e.g. R470B, that are not available in the Annual and Commercial licenses.

 

9. The 64-bit license of EES is only available for the Professional license.

 

10. The Diagram window and Plots can be animated and shown in a time series with the Professional license.

 

11. The genetic optimization and Nelder Mead optimization algorithms are options in the Professional license.

 

12. The Professional license allows the results of the optimization process to be logged to a text file.

 

13. Selected equations in the Formatted Equations window can be converted to LaTeX or MathType format in the Professional license. 

 

14. The position of text in the Plot windows can be specified relative to the position of a data point.

 

15. Text in the Equations window can be protected in the Professional license.

 

16.  The Professional license is able to write .EEZ files which are compressed .EES files that require much less space.  All licenses of EES can read .EEZ files.

 

17.  The Professional license allows guess values and lower/upper limits to be specified in the Variable Information dialog with equations.

 

18. The Professional license allows the characteristics to be saved in a .EPT (EES plot template) file so that the characteristics of one plot can be transferred to other plots. The Professional license also provides capability to time sequence the display of plotted data.  

 

19.  Polylines, Bezier curves, and polygons can be placed on the Diagram and Plot windows in the Professional license.

 

20.  The Professional license can do larger uncertainty propagation problems.  It can simultaneously determine the uncertainty propagation of up to 50 selected variables (vs 6 in the Annual and 12 in the Commercial license) in terms of the uncertainties of up to 200 measured variables (vs 10 in the Annual and 30 in the Commercial licenses).  The choices made for the calculated and measured variables and their associated relative or absolute uncertainties can be saved by clicking the Save Uncertainty Information button in the Uncertainty Propagation or Uncertainty Propagation Table dialog. These choices can later be restored by clicking the Open Uncertainty Information button in these dialogs. Saving the uncertainty information allows one EES file to solve several different uncertainty problems without having to reenter the uncertainty settings. The Save Uncertainty Information saves a text file having an .UNC file name extension. 

 

21.   The Professional (3-D Plotting) license can generate 3D Polygon/Points and Symbol Color plots.

 

22. The Professional license supports Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) which can be used to interact with other programs such as MATLAB or EXCEL. In addition, the Professional license provides macro commands that allow direct communication with MATLAB or EXCEL using a COM interface and the Serial Communications Port.

 

23. A Plot Thumbnails window is available in the Professional license that displays all of the plots in the EES file at a size controlled by the user. Right-clicking on a thumbnail moves the focus to the selected plot in Plot window. 

 

24.   The Professional license can have up to 80 independent variables for an optimization problem.  The Annual and Commercial licenses are limited to 10, and 20, respectively.

 

25. The $CopyToLookup directive is available in the Professional license. This directive makes it very easy to move calculated scaler and array variables to a column in the Lookup table window. The data in the Lookup table can be written to an external file in a variety of formats. 

 

26. The Professional license provides access to the Component Library, which provides high-level component models for energy systems. Click here to see information about the components in this library.

 

27. In the Professional license, the Plot window crosshairs can be used to identify the location of a plotted point in a table.  The status bar will show the coordinates of the point, the table that the data originated in and the row in that table.

 

28.  Clicking the triangular icon at the upper right of each column in a Parametric or Lookup table brings up a dialog in which values in specified rows of the column can be entered.  The Professional license will accept a previously defined variable name in place of a number in this dialog and in the Alter Values dialog (accessed from the Table menu).  For example, if variable L is set to a constant in the equations window, L can be entered in place of its value in the First Value and Increment/Last fields.  In addition, values can be entered in either the base or alternate units.  More information on this capability is provided in the Change Table Column dialog

 

29. The Lookup tables in EES are designed to hold tabular data, such as that taken experimentally. Clicking on the triangular icon at the upper right of each column allows the data in one column of the table to be entered with an equation that uses data in other cells, EES variables, or EES functions. In the Professional license, the calculated data can be automatically updated making the Lookup table in EES function operate similar to a spreadsheet program.

 

30. Uncertainty values can be input in either the main or alternate unit set in the Professional license.

 

31. The $INPUT directive in the Professional license can be used to prompt the user to enter a variable value when solving.

 

32. EES can read NIST REFPROP .FLD (fluid) files and thereby provide thermodynamic property data for these fluids in the same manner as for built-in fluids.

 

33. Text in the Diagram Window can be displayed at a specified angle between -90 deg and 90 deg in the Professional license.

 

34. The font name and font size used in the Equations Window can be specified with a $Font directive.

 

35. In the Professional license, text items and buttons placed on the Diagram window can act as hyperlinks when clicked to open a browser to a specified page, open a .pdf file or start a program.

 

36.  The LinearRegression procedure available in the Professional license allows the parameters and statistics of the curve fitting process to be determined programmatically and thus they can be directly used in subsequent equations within the Equations window.

 

37.  The Professional license is able to construct area plots in which the area below the plot line is filled with a specified color.

 

38.  The Professional license allows hidden hyperlinks to be placed within comments in the Equations window. Clicking on the link starts the browser or program. The links are also active in the Formatted Equations window

 

39.  The Professional license allows the values of input and output variables in the Diagram window to be entered and displayed in the variable's alternate unit system.

 

40.  The Professonal license provides an interface to Python.

 

41.  The Professional license can generate a plot from a directive in the Equations window using the $NewPlot, $OverlayPlot and $PropertyPlot directives. 

 

42.  The Professional license allows radio buttons, check boxes, links of various types, movies and object embedding and linking to be used in the Diagram window.