From: Paul
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 17:58:59 +0100
Subject: [TSSP] Magnifiers, Modeling, and Macros
Hi All, A few bits and pieces... Does anyone want a section on 'magnifiers' in pn1401, or should that be deferred to a later document? Using the operators already defined in pn1401 as building blocks, the magnifier - and for that matter, arbitrary extra coils - can be 'connected in' to the analysis simply by stringing together the appropriate operators (as long as the extra coils are far enough away from one another that their E and B fields don't interact significantly). Eg for a standard magnifier, the cross-coupling between the second and third coils involves the top-drive operator of the 2nd coil and the base drive operator of the 3rd coil (both equ 2.16 in latest pn1401), along with the individual solenoid operators. You end up with an operator for the whole thing, which you then submit to the normal mode analysis in the usual way. It all seems to come out quite neatly, but I'm not particularly bothered about writing this up at the moment. The software organisation is quite different now, with most of the code in a common library module tlib.c, and the various simulation programs just call out routines from tlib as needed. Eg there are functions which return each of the operators (or their kernel functions) as matrices, and there are other library routines to add and multiply them, and to solve inverses and so on. Other routines locate the complex frequencies of the modes of a given operator, and another computes the eigenfunctions. All this means that from now on its fairly easy to throw together an ad-hoc program to suit a particular configuration or experiment. Hopefully this will encourage others to use the software in ways of their own devising, as its quite impossible for one person, given just a single lifetime, to explore the available permutations. BTW, the library and simulation programs should compile under windows, because I've avoided doing anything unix-specific in the code.The fancy multi-cpu stuff was taken out ages ago, Marco made tsim compile on his PC, and I don't think I've added anything in since which will have broken that port. The only thing that won't go to windows is the shed load of plotting and analysis scripts - unix shell scripts which apply standard tools to the data files produced by the simulation programs. I'm not sure what to do about these. Maybe if there is an 'excel' expert out there, we could team up to produce some macros which will take care of basic plotting and so on. Others might be harder, eg I'm just doing a script which reads the simulator time domain output file and creates an mpeg movie of the secondary voltage profile - I don't think you can combine diverse tools in this way under windows? Anyway, one way or another, we should try to find ways to make the tssp software more accessible, otherwise when I get bored with all this and go back to astronomical computing (I've a pulsar detection suite to finish off later this year), I suspect this code will just sit on a website gathering dust. Cheers, -- Paul Nicholson, Manchester, UK. --
Maintainer Paul Nicholson, paul@abelian.demon.co.uk.